Light emission from an IBM S390 microchip

Airline passengers on a night flight can see the traffic of cities beneath them traced out by illumination from vehicles' headlights.  In much the same way, computer designers can use light emitted by speeding electrons to examine the activity of circuits in computer chips. IBM researchers have discovered and developed this observation into a technology that electronic engineers can use to spot problems in their circuit designs and manufacturing processes, and to debug chips.

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