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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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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