Short for
silicon-on-insulator, a type of
semiconductor fabrication technique developed by IBM. Unlike
CMOS-based
chips that are
doped with impurities that enable a chip to store
capacitance that must be discharged and recharged, SOI chips are formed by setting
transistors on a thin
silicon layer that is separated from the silicon substrate by an insulating layer of thin silicon oxide or glass, which minimizes capacitance (or the energy absorbed from the transistor).
