The SOI Industry Consortium has announced that NVIDIA has joined the organization. NVIDIA now joins a league of companies such as AMD, Applied Materials, ARM, Cadence Design Systems, CEA-Léti, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Innovative Silicon, KLA-Tencor, Lam Research, Magma Design, Samsung, Semico, Soitec, SEH Europe, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Tyndall Institute, UCL and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC).

So what is SOI? Silicon on Insulator technology involves use of variable layered silicon-insulator-silicon substratum, used to minimize parasitic device capacitance and thereby improve performance.

US engineers at Princeton University have managed to develop a new method for producing computer chips using carbon instead of the silicon used in current chips. As silicon is now reaching its limit, researchers have been searching for an alternative material to use for the last few years. Graphene, which is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice, could potentially process information and produce radio transmissions ten times more efficiently than silicon, which makes it an ideal replacement. The problem until now has been that engineers believed that they would need graphene in the same form as silicon to make chips, which would require a single crystal 8" or 12" wide. Graphene crystals have only been made a couple of millimetres wide so far, which is not big enough to produce chips. However, the new technique involves using small crystals of graphene in the active part of the chip, which would not require a big wafer. This could help to fuel future chip development and allow for much faster computers.