Ten years ago, graduate students at Harvard University found a way of making silicon more responsive, by blasting the surface with a wafer, using a brief pulse of laser energy, along with dopants. They called the result “black silicon”, which was a much improved silicon and was able to absorb protons and release electrons much better. Now a company went official and said that they have been working for three years on this technology and are going to commercialize this process.

The company that will develop the “black silicon” is called SiOnyx and is confident that their technology is able to help manufacturers build much more efficient photovoltaic cells and sensitive detectors, without using anything else than the silicon-based process they currently use.

Black silicon could revolutionize some of nowadays technologies, like solar energy generation, medical imaging and digital photography.

“You’ve never been able to detect light the way this stuff detects light. It means that you solve a clear and obvious pain point for a very large number of customers,” says Stephen Saylor, SiOnyx CeO.

The Black Silicon can be integrated into current semiconductor fabrication lines, because is just a simple silicon roughed by chemical treatment and a femtosecond laser pulse, which is not a hard process. Carey says: “You can do everything we’re talking about without extraordinary, Herculean effort, and you can do it in a way that fits with high-volume manufacturing flows.”

SiOnyx has started working on the black silicon in 2005 and obtained from Harris & Harris, Redshift Ventures, and Polaris Venture Partners $11 million in venture financing in 2007. The company is now going official because “we have enough momentum now both with strategic partners and with the technology that it makes sense at this point to share a little more about what we are up to,” says Saylor.

Isaac Kohlberg says that “the exciting steps being taken to develop for commercial application serve as even more evidence of the entrepreneurial energy that continues to gel and accelerate at Harvard.”