The chips, which are known as light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.'s, have huge performance advantages in many mundane tasks. In devices like traffic lights, for example, they consume 80 percent less electricity than do the bulbs they replace and last up to 10 times as long. Moreover, they have the safety advantage of gradually fading instead of unpredictably burning out.

Beyond such obvious benefits, though, it is the ease of mating the chips to computers that is driving interest. Programs simple enough to run on a hand-held personal digital assistant can alter the intensity, pattern and colors produced by solid-state lights. Color Kinetics, a five-year-old lighting company based in Boston, calculates that the various chips it packages with computer controls can generate up to 16.7 million colors.