The substance he abused: Bakelite, a phenolic resin invented in 1909 and often used as an electrical insulator.
But silicon-on-insulator, first used in costly satellite and military applications, is practical for only high-end chips.
It will have to be an insulator and to be transparent to the relevant laser light.
His invention was 96% air and turned out to be an excellent insulator.
It means that electrons from the metal can end up in the superconductor without having to pass through the insulator.
The next step is for scientists to run tests on the sandstone, which acts as an insulator for the hot water.
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Other chemists have avoided doing this because they reckoned that solid dioxide is an insulator and therefore could not be electrolysed.
It can survive exposure to a vacuum, and it seems to be an insulator which is why the researchers have chosen it.
Intel's new insulator replaces silicon dioxide with a metallic alloy called hafnium.
Boeing has suggested an electrical insulator that wraps around each battery cell to isolate each cell from each other and the battery case.
This alloy isn't new--it's been used as a neutron absorber in nuclear power plants--but hafnium's use as a chip insulator required a fabrication breakthrough.
The better the insulator, the more charge a capacitor can hold.
Its wafers, dubbed silicon-on-insulator, or SOI, can go into standard chipmaking equipment but are engineered to reduce power consumption, and thus heat, by up to 50%.
As an alternative the Silicon On Insulator (SOI) consortium, which includes Globalfoundries, an American firm, and ARM, a British one, is trying to improve flat transistors.
The new PlayStation 3 also will be cooled with silicon-on-insulator.
What's left is machine-ready silicon atop a layer of insulator.
Glasslike silicon dioxide has been the insulator of choice in electronic chips since 1959, when Bob Noyce cobbled together the first silicon integrated circuit--wires and switches etched into silicon insulation.
That done, trying the experiment with different conductors may suggest why a subtle change in the structure of an insulator or a superconductor can cause a major change in its character.
For instance, graphite and diamond are both made of carbon, but the difference in the crystalline arrangements of their carbon atoms means that graphite conducts electricity while diamond is a good insulator.
Silicon has been the favored insulator for tiny wires and switches ever since, even as successive generations of chip wires and switches have been shrunk to the width of a single wavelength of light.
The consortium's technology builds its transistors inside a sliver of pure silicon, laid on top of an insulator, which in turn sits on top of a standard wafer, the substrate on which transistors are constructed.
Starting with two silicon wafers, Soitec machines coat the surface of one with silicon dioxide insulator and embed inside it a thin fault line of hydrogen atoms anywhere from 100 to 20, 000 nanometers below the surface, depending on customers' desired wafer thickness.
By contrast, check out today's announcement from Big Blue: Its new flagship eServer zSeries 990 runs up to 9 billion instructions per second on 32 processors--three times the system capacity of its predecessor z900--thanks in part to a palm-sized package of copper and silicon-on-insulator semiconductors with over 3.2 billion transistors and 500 meters of ultra-thin wire.
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