Silicon is the dominant element for manufacturing electronic devices due to its ability to be transformed into semiconductors, the basic building blocks for diodes and transistors.  As electronic devices become more complex, there is a challenge to pack as many transistors into as smaller footprint as possible.  This is where nanoscience, a technology which addresses the construction of electronic circuitry on a molecular scale, comes into play.    The feasibility of this concept was first perceived by an American physicist named Richard Feynman in 1959.  Nowadays, two approaches for creating a nanostructure or a microelectronic circuitry have been established.  The first is achieved by chemical etching and the second is by a nanoscale self-assembly methods such as Epitaxy.

In 1990, silicon made another headline as an efficient and bright photoluminescence (PL) was discovered in porous silicon at room temperature.  This discovery led to the invention of high efficiency lighting called Light Emitting Diode (LED).  As silicon is a poor infrared wave (heat) emitter even at low temperature, virtually all of the energy is converted to visible light, resulting in low power consumption.  Canham and Lehmann later found that the photoluminescence property in silicon was induced by quantum confinement.  This finding has been reconfirmed by other scientists.