Since they are built on to a flat wafer, rather than etched out of it, layers of vertical transistors could even be constructed on top of one another, raising the intriguing possibility of multi-storey semiconductors.

ECONOMIST: Transistors: A tall story | The

Normally, this would result in unseemly blisters bursting out all over a wafer's surface.

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The balance spring is etched out of a thin silicon wafer using a photolithographic technique, similar to that used for microelectronic chips, so its exact shape and thickness can be more carefully controlled than with metal.

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Dive into the crowd at MacWorld gathered around Apple's latest product, the MacBook Air, and they'll quickly point out what could be the wafer-thin machines biggest flaw: Users can't swap in fresh batteries. (See: " Into Thin (MacBook) Air") That could be a deal-breaker for road warriors looking for a lightweight notebook.

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Though Intel and TI are integrated device manufacturers investing billions annually in new wafer fabs, Qualcomm has been able to maintain generally lower costs by farming out production of their leading edge designs to foundries -- such as Taiwan Semiconductor, Chartered Semiconductor and IBM--and moving to the next node (now 65 nanometers) whenever costs dictate.

FORBES

Once we arrived at the world of Universal, I discovered that the Loews Portofino Bay Hotel looked strikingly like Portofino, Italy, with its Necco-wafer-colored Italian-ish buildings jammed together in front of a piazza with hollowed out Vespa scooters bolted to the ground.

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