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SOI

Webopedia Staff
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:55 am
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).