Re:The article is pretty useless.... (Score 1)

Following on from the previous posts, as to why this has taken so long to develop, there are 2 basic reasons: 1. It is not easy to make SOI wafers! In the SIMOX process, (see previous post), it took years to figure out how to reduce the defect density to acceptable levels. 2. SOI devices are fundamentally different to 'normal' devices in that they may partially or fully deplete the top silicon layer of charge carriers. This does not occur when the silicon device layer is the thickness of an entire wafer! Practically, this means that the device modellers had to go back to square one and produce entirely new models for how the devices really worked, and it took IBM some years to learn how to design transistors on SOI. So it's really quite an achievement, and not just a small incremental change. - r.