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.

FORBES: Magazine Article

But silicon-on-insulator, first used in costly satellite and military applications, is practical for only high-end chips.

FORBES: Chillin' Chips

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.

ECONOMIST: Transistors

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.

FORBES: IBM Does The On-Demand Dance