Silicon on Insulator

ALSO CALLED: SOI, SOI Chips, Silicon-on-Insulator, SOI Microprocessors
DEFINITION: SOI is also an abbreviation for service-oriented integration.Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) is a semiconductor fabricationtechnique developed by IBM that uses pure crystal silicon and silicon oxide for integrated circuits (ICs) and microchips. An SOI microchip processing speed is often 30% faster than today's complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS)-based chips and power consumption is reduced 80%,  … 
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SILICON ON INSULATOR DEFINITION (continued): …  which makes them ideal for mobile devices. SOI chips also reduce the soft error rate, which is data corruption caused by cosmic rays and natural radioactive background signals.A CMOS-based chip has impurities added to it, a process called "doping", that allows the chip to store an electrical charge called capacitance. In order to control the electrical currents needed, the capacitance must be discharged and recharged, which takes time and causes the transistors on the chip to heat up. This production of heat limits the speed at which microchips can operate. For this reason, microchips have poor … 
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