Using light to convey signals around electronic chips could solve several current problems in microelectronic evolution, including power dissipation, interconnect bottleneck, input/output of the chip to optical communication channels, signal bandwidth, and so forth. Unfortunately, silicon is not a good photonic material: it has poor light-emission efficiency and negligible electrooptic effect. Silicon photonics is a field with the objective of improving the physical properties of silicon, thus turning it into a photonic material and allowing full convergence between electronics and photonics. Various research directions based on the use of nano-sized silicon are described.