SOI

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).