Engineering
Scientists have unveiled a roadmap for bringing perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells to market, paving the way for a future powered by abundant, inexpensive clean energy in Saudi Arabia and the world.
Jan 11, 2024
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109
Energy & Green Tech
As climate change intensifies summer heat, demand is growing for technologies to cool buildings. Now, researchers report in ACS Energy Letters that they have used advanced computing technology and artificial intelligence ...
Nov 2, 2022
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88
Electronics & Semiconductors
People love their electric cars. But not so much the bulky batteries and related power systems that take up precious cargo space.
May 29, 2020
3
215
Energy & Green Tech
Researchers working to maximize solar panel efficiency said layering advanced materials atop traditional silicon is a promising path to eke more energy out of sunlight. A new study shows that by using a precisely controlled ...
Oct 6, 2020
1
89
Electronics & Semiconductors
To make computer chips, technologists around the world rely on atomic layer deposition (ALD), which can create films as fine as one atom thick. Businesses commonly use ALD to make semiconductor devices, but it also has applications ...
Jun 25, 2021
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277
Engineering
Some experts in the field of electronics engineering have suggested that the use of silicon complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS) will start declining rapidly by the end of 2020. Despite their predictions, a class ...
Energy & Green Tech
To increase the performance of solar panels, an international collaboration—including researchers from King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) and U of T Engineering—has created a bifacial, or two-sided, ...
Jan 12, 2021
1
129
Engineering
MIT researchers have, for the first time, fabricated a diamond-based quantum sensor on a silicon chip. The advance could pave the way toward low-cost, scalable hardware for quantum computing, sensing, and communication.
Sep 25, 2019
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943
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 ...
Energy & Green Tech
Argonne's new electrolyte mixture stabilizes silicon anodes during cycling.
Oct 10, 2019
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1305
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
