Find the word definition

Crossword clues for silicon

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
silicon
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
silicon chip
▪ the age of the silicon chip
silicon chip
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
chip
▪ With modern technology many thousands of bistables can be formed on one silicon chip.
▪ Today computer networks and intricate silicon chips are grown too.
▪ But nuclear power brought nuclear warheads, plastics brought pollution, and the silicon chip promises unemployment for some people.
▪ Complexity poured into the artificial medium of machines and silicon chips will only be in further flux.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ And the danger is not confined to silicon valleys.
▪ Loyal, bonded silicon brains, hired for cheap and at your command, even if you were only 13.
▪ Mead attempts to achieve the same kind of representation in silicon as he sees in the biological.
▪ Second-pass silicon will sample in the third quarter, with mass production coming by the end of the year.
▪ The silicon ingots are highly perfect single crystals and on the atomic scale the cutting has to proceed through breaking bonds.
▪ The density of optical interconnections can be much greater than even the most advanced silicon and gallium arsenide processes.
▪ The success of diamond in cutting silicon is a measure of diamond's extreme resistance to abrasion.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Silicon

Silicon \Sil"i*con\, n. [See Silica.] (Chem.) A nonmetalic element analogous to carbon. It always occurs combined in nature, and is artificially obtained in the free state, usually as a dark brown amorphous powder, or as a dark crystalline substance with a meetallic luster. Its oxide is silica, or common quartz, and in this form, or as silicates, it is, next to oxygen, the most abundant element of the earth's crust. Silicon is characteristically the element of the mineral kingdom, as carbon is of the organic world. Symbol Si. Atomic weight 28. Called also silicium.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
silicon

nonmetallic element, 1817, coined by British chemist Thomas Thomson from silica (silicon dioxide), from which it was isolated. The name is patterned on carbon, etc. Silicon chip first attested 1965; Silicon Valley for the Santa Clara Valley south of San Francisco, U.S., first attested 1974, from the concentration of manufacturers of silicon chips used in computers, watches, etc.

Wiktionary
silicon

Etymology 1 n. (context chemistry English) A nonmetallic element (''symbol'' Si) with an atomic number of 14 and atomic weight of 28.0855. Etymology 2

n. 1 (context slang English) computing 2 (context slang English) computer processor 3 (abbreviation of lang=en silicon chip)

WordNet
silicon

n. a tetravalent nonmetallic element; next to oxygen it is the most abundant element in the earth's crust; occurs in clay and feldspar and granite and quartz and sand; used as a semiconductor in transistors [syn: Si, atomic number 14]

Wikipedia
Silicon (journal)

Silicon is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Springer and founded in 2009 by editor in chief Stephen Clarson. It deals with all aspects of silicon. Published research involves materials biology, materials physics, materials chemistry, materials engineering, and environmental science. The journal caters to chemists, physicists, engineers, biologists, and environmental scientists.

Silicon (disambiguation)

Silicon is a chemical element.

Silicon may also refer to:

  • Isotopes of silicon
  • Silicon (journal), a scientific journal
  • Silicon (band), a band who has recently emerged and is on one of Domino Recording Company's small labels, Weird World.
Silicon

Silicon is a chemical element with symbol Si and atomic number 14. It is a tetravalent metalloid, more reactive than germanium, the metalloid directly below it in the table. Controversy about silicon's character dates to its discovery. It was first prepared and characterized in pure form in 1823. In 1808, it was given the name silicium (from , hard stone or flint), with an -ium word-ending to suggest a metal, a name which the element retains in several languages. The present English name was first suggested in 1817 to conform with the physically similar elements, carbon and boron.

Silicon is the eighth most common element in the universe by mass, but very rarely occurs as the pure free element in the Earth's crust. It is most widely distributed in dusts, sands, planetoids, and planets as various forms of silicon dioxide (silica) or silicates. Over 90% of the Earth's crust is composed of silicate minerals, making silicon the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust (about 28% by mass) after oxygen.

Most silicon is used commercially without being separated, and often with little processing of the natural minerals. Such use includes industrial construction with clays, silica sand, and stone. Silicate is used in Portland cement for mortar and stucco, and mixed with silica sand and gravel to make concrete for walkways, foundations, and roads. Silicates are used in whiteware ceramics such as porcelain, and in traditional quartz-based soda-lime glass and many other specialty glasses. Silicon compounds such as silicon carbide are used as abrasives and components of high-strength ceramics.

Elemental silicon also has a large impact on the modern world economy. Most free silicon is used in the steel refining, aluminium-casting, and fine chemical industries (often to make fumed silica). Even more visibly, the relatively small portion of very highly purified silicon used in semiconductor electronics (< 10%) is essential to integrated circuits — most computers, cell phones, and modern technology depends on it. Silicon is the basis of the widely used synthetic polymers called silicones.

Silicon is an essential element in biology, although only tiny traces are required by animals. However, various sea sponges and microorganisms, such as diatoms and radiolaria, secrete skeletal structures made of silica. Silica is deposited in many plant tissues, such as in the bark and wood of Chrysobalanaceae and the silica cells and silicified trichomes of Cannabis sativa, horsetails and many grasses.

Usage examples of "silicon".

The FDA permits so much aflatoxin in food that the peanut butter in your sandwich can be seventy-five times more hazardous than a liter of contaminated Silicon Valley water, the amount you would drink in a day if they would only let you.

Normers verified his theory of gravimagnetic rotations, and it turned out, in addition, that on planets of type C Meoli there can exist not tri- but tetraploids of silicon, and on that moon where Arder nearly did himself in there is nothing but lousy lava and bubbles the size of skyscrapers.

Detected were: iron, silicon, carbon, platinum, gold, lead, indium, gallium, gadolinium, dysprosium, lanthanum, xenon, potassium, astatine.

A raft of rough silicon sheets, foamed aluminium I-beams, and empty plastic drink tanksfamiliar enough to bring tears to her eyeswas lying on the bank, half in the water.

The message to Holden, she explained, was spelled out in an alternating pattern of hydrogen atoms and silicon atoms.

In resentful unfolding gusts the cloud pushes its innards out and Judah sees movement inside, not wind-driven or random, and arms, supplicant, emerge from the obscurity and a man comes out, greyed by wisps that cling to him and become silicon chitin, crusting him as he falls, and behind is another belching of mist and another figure pushes through smokestone visibly harder now, wading through dough, scabbed with it, labouring under matter.

Silicon fluoride is evolved, and, if a moistened glass rod is held in the tube, it becomes coated with a white deposit of silica, formed by the decomposition of the Silicon fluoride by the water.

Finally, above three billion degrees, silicon, which is produced in a process involving collisions of oxygen nuclei, begins to burn, and all the elements are produced up to and including iron.

The upper and lighter layer, fifteen miles thick, was composed of lighter rock known by the invented word sial, indicating silicon and aluminum.

It would be more accurate to say it causes the silicon and terbium to react to provide the necessary reaction heat.

The thing had completed just two rows of bricks since Tweel and I left it, and there it was, breathing in silicon and breathing out bricks as if it had eternity to do it in - which it has.

It hosts branches of Silicon Valley household names such as Credence, HPL, and Virage Logic.

Silicon Valley billionaire buddies from AOL and Oracle, the US Justice Department compelled Microsoft to divulge its proprietary codes and license Windows software to the Gore-Techs at a government-capped price.

Some said that strange glowing beings from the Silicon Valley had wandered in overnight and started the baby dome, then infiltrated the Psychics, the Gaians, and the Extropians, whose neural architecture would be read into the Dome, become part of its exponentially growing referential power.

Zero-one silicon switch, zero-one quantum foam bubbling up into prokaryote paramecium parakeet philosopher, what difference does it make?