US charges former Uber security chief in hack cover-up
US prosecutors on Thursday charged Uber's former security chief with covering up a hack that compromised the personal information of 57 million users and drivers.
Aug 21, 2020
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Business
US prosecutors on Thursday charged Uber's former security chief with covering up a hack that compromised the personal information of 57 million users and drivers.
Aug 21, 2020
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Engineering
"For the first time ever, we have direct experimental evidence that an external quantum efficiency above 100% is possible in a single photodiode without any external antireflection," says Hele Savin, associate professor of ...
Engineering
Have you ever spilled your coffee on your desk? You may then have observed one of the most puzzling phenomena of fluid mechanics—the coffee ring effect. This effect has hindered the industrial deployment of functional inks ...
Aug 12, 2020
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Business
Autonomous driving engineer Anthony Levandowski was ordered to spend 18 months prison for stealing trade secrets from Google as he defected to Uber Technologies Inc., in one of the highest-profile criminal cases to hit Silicon ...
Aug 5, 2020
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Electronics & Semiconductors
When it comes to the future of solar energy cells, say farewell to silicon, and hello to calcium titanium oxide—the compound mineral better known as perovskite.
Aug 3, 2020
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Internet
Facebook reported Thursday that its quarterly profit had nearly doubled and users grew despite a boycott by advertisers and the pandemic-induced economic turmoil.
Jul 31, 2020
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Energy & Green Tech
The search for the perfect solar cell is not yet over. Norwegian researchers are now adopting a new approach to the cells' raw material, crystalline silicon, with the aim of making the electricity-generating cells even more ...
Jul 15, 2020
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Energy & Green Tech
Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have conducted the first global assessment into the most promising approaches to end-of-life management for solar photovoltaic (PV) modules.
Jul 14, 2020
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Automotive
Four days after shelving an autonomous vehicle agreement with BMW, Mercedes has announced a deal to work with chip and software maker NVIDIA.
Jun 23, 2020
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Electronics & Semiconductors
Neuromorphic computing entails building architectures inspired by elements of the human brain, such as neural organization and synapses. These architectures have proved to be highly promising and advantageous for a number ...
Silicon (pronounced /ˈsɪlɨkən/ or /ˈsɪlɨkɒn/, Latin: silicium) is the most common metalloid. It is a chemical element, which has the symbol Si and atomic number 14. The atomic mass is 28.0855. A tetravalent metalloid, silicon is less reactive than its chemical analog carbon. As the eighth most common element in the universe by mass, silicon very rarely occurs as the pure free element in nature, but is more widely distributed in dusts, planetoids and planets as various forms of silicon dioxide (silica) or silicates. On Earth, silicon is the second most abundant element (after oxygen) in the crust, making up 25.7% of the crust by mass.
Silicon has many industrial uses. It is the principal component of most semiconductor devices, most importantly integrated circuits or microchips. Silicon is widely used in semiconductors because it remains a semiconductor at higher temperatures than the semiconductor germanium and because its native oxide is easily grown in a furnace and forms a better semiconductor/dielectric interface than any other material.
In the form of silica and silicates, silicon forms useful glasses, cements, and ceramics. It is also a constituent of silicones, a class-name for various synthetic plastic substances made of silicon, oxygen, carbon and hydrogen, often confused with silicon itself.
Silicon is an essential element in biology, although only tiny traces of it appear to be required by animals. It is much more important to the metabolism of plants, particularly many grasses, and silicic acid (a type of silica) forms the basis of the striking array of protective shells of the microscopic diatoms.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA