Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: Is dimethecone a silicone?
Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), also known as dimethylpolysiloxane or dimethicone, belongs to a group of polymeric organosilicon compounds that are commonly referred to as silicones.[1] PDMS is the most widely used silicon-based organic polymer, and is particularly known for its unusual rheological (or flow) properties. PDMS is optically clear, and, in general, inert, non-toxic, and non-flammable. It is one of several types of silicone oil (polymerized siloxane). Its applications range from contact lenses and medical devices to elastomers; it is also present in shampoos (as dimethicone makes hair shiny and slippery), food (antifoaming agent), caulking, lubricants and heat-resistant tiles.
Because silicon is an important element in high-technology semiconductor devices, many places in the world bear its name. For example, Santa Clara Valley in California acquired the nickname Silicon Valley, as the element is the base material in the semiconductor industry there. Since then, many other places have been dubbed similarly, including Silicon Forest in Oregon, Silicon Hills in Austin, Texas, Silicon Slopes in Salt Lake City, Utah, Silicon Saxony in Germany, Silicon Valley in India, Silicon Border in Mexicali, Mexico, Silicon Fen in Cambridge, England, Silicon Roundabout in London, Silicon Glen in Scotland, and Silicon Gorge in Bristol, England.[24]
Microcrystalline silicon (also called nanocrystalline silicon) is amorphous silicon, but also contains small crystals. It absorbs a broader spectrum of light and is flexible. Micromorphous silicon module technology combines two different types of silicon, amorphous and microcrystalline silicon, in a top and a bottom photovoltaic cell. Sharp produces cells using this system in order to more efficiently capture blue light, increasing the efficiency of the cells during the time where there is no direct sunlight falling on them. Protocrystalline silicon is often used to optimize the open circuit voltage of a-Si photovoltaics.
The leading global manufacturers of silicone base materials belong to three regional organizations: the European Silicone Center (CES) in Brussels, Belgium; the Environment Health and Safety Council (SEHSC) in Herndon, Virginia, USA; and the Silicone Industry Association of Japan (SIAJ) in Tokyo, Japan. Dow Corning Silicones, Evonik Industries, Momentive Performance Materials, Milliken and Company (SiVance Specialty Silicones), Shin-Etsu Silicones, Wacker Chemie, Bluestar Silicones, JNC Corporation, Wacker Asahikasei Silicone, and Dow Corning Toray represent the collective membership of these organizations. A fourth organization, the Global Silicone Council (GSC) acts as an umbrella structure over the regional organizations. All four are non-profit, having no commercial role; their primary missions are to promote the safety of silicones from a health, safety, and environmental perspective. As the European chemical industry is preparing to implement the Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals (REACH) legislation, CES is leading the formation of a consortium of silicones, silanes, and siloxanes producers and importers to facilitate data and cost sharing.
SONOS, short for "silicon–oxide–nitride–oxide–silicon", more precisely, "polycrystalline silicon"—"silicon dioxide"—"silicon nitride"—"siicon dioxide"—"silicon",
is a cross sectional structure of MOSFET, realized in late 70's. This structure is often used for non-volatile memories, such as EEPROM and flash memories. It is sometimes used for TFT LCD displays.
It is one of CTF (charge trap flash) variants. It is distinguished from traditional non-volatile memory structures by the use of silicon nitride (SiN or SiN) instead of "polysilicon-based FG (floating-gate)" for the charge storage material.
A further variant is "SHINOS" ("silicon"—"hi-k"—"nitride"—"oxide"—"silicon"), which is substituted top oxide layer with high-κ material. Another advanced variant is "MONOS" ("metal–oxide–nitride–oxide–silicon").
Amorphous silicon differs from other allotropic variations, such as monocrystalline silicon—a single crystal, and polycrystalline silicon, that consists of small grains, also known as crystallites.
Silicon is a fourfold coordinated atom that is normally tetrahedrally bonded to four neighboring silicon atoms. In crystalline silicon (c-Si) this tetrahedral structure continues over a large range, thus forming a well-ordered crystal lattice.
Silicones, also known as polysiloxanes, are polymers that include any synthetic compound made up of repeating units of siloxane, which is a chain of alternating silicon atoms and oxygen atoms, combined with carbon, hydrogen, and sometimes other elements. They are typically heat-resistant and either liquid or rubber-like, and are used in sealants, adhesives, lubricants, medicine, cooking utensils, and thermal and electrical insulation. Some common forms include silicone oil, silicone grease, silicone rubber, silicone resin, and silicone caulk.
Silicone is sometimes mistakenly referred to as silicon. The chemical element silicon is a crystalline metalloid widely used in computers and other electronic equipment. Although silicones contain silicon atoms, they also include carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and perhaps other kinds of atoms as well, and have physical and chemical properties that are very different from elemental silicon.
Silicon tetrachloride is prepared by the chlorination of various silicon compounds such as ferrosilicon, silicon carbide, or mixtures of silicon dioxide and carbon. The ferrosilicon route is most common.
Silicon borides (also known as boron silicides) are lightweight ceramic compounds formed between silicon and boron. Several stoichiometric silicon boride compounds, SiB, have been reported: silicon triboride, SiB, silicon tetraboride, SiB, silicon hexaboride, SiB, as well as SiB ("n" = 14, 15, 40, etc.). The "n" = 3 and "n" = 6 phases were reported as being co-produced together as a mixture for the first time by Henri Moissan and Alfred Stock in 1900 by briefly heating silicon and boron in a clay vessel. The tetraboride was first reported as being synthesized directly from the elements in 1960 by three independent groups: Carl Cline and Donald Sands; Ervin Colton; and Cyrill Brosset and Bengt Magnusson. It has been proposed that the triboride is a silicon-rich version of the tetraboride. Hence, the stoichiometry of either compound could be expressed as SiB where "x" = 0 or 1. All the silicon borides are black, crystalline materials of similar density: 2.52 and 2.47 g cm, respectively, for the "n" = 3(4) and 6 compounds. On the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, SiB and SiB are intermediate between diamond (10) and ruby (9). The silicon borides may be grown from boron-saturated silicon in either the solid or liquid state.
Silicon and silicon carbide readily react with all four stable halogens, forming the colourless, reactive, and volatile silicon tetrahalides.[43] Silicon tetrafluoride also may be made by fluorinating the other silicon halides, and is produced by the attack of hydrofluoric acid on glass.[44] Heating two different tetrahalides together also produce a random mixture of mixed halides, which may also be produced by halogen exchange reactions. The melting and boiling points of these species usually rise with increasing atomic weight, though there are many exceptions: for example, the melting and boiling points drop as one passes from SiFBr3 through SiFClBr2 to SiFCl2Br. The shift from the hypoelectronic elements in group 13 and earlier to the group 14 elements is illustrated by the change from an infinite ionic structure in aluminium fluoride to a lattice of simple covalent silicon tetrafluoride molecules, as dictated by the lower electronegativity of aluminium than silicon, the stoichiometry (the +4 oxidation state being too high for true ionicity), and the smaller size of the silicon atom compared to the aluminium atom.[43] Silicon tetrachloride is manufactured on a huge scale as a precursor to the production of pure silicon, silicon dioxide, and some silicon esters.[43] The silicon tetrahalides hydrolyse readily in water, unlike the carbon tetrahalides, again because of the larger size of the silicon atom rendering it more open to nucleophilic attack and the ability of the silicon atom to expand its octet which carbon lacks.[44] The reaction of silicon fluoride with excess hydrofluoric acid produces the octahedral hexafluorosilicate anion SiF2− 6.[44]
Strained silicon directly on insulator (SSDOI) is a procedure developed by IBM which removes the silicon germanium layer in the strained silicon process leaving the strained silicon directly on the insulator. In contrast, strained silicon on SGOI provides a strained silicon layer on a relaxed silicon germanium layer on an insulator, as developed by MIT.
The properties of silicon may be used to modify alloys with metals other than iron. "Metallurgical grade" silicon is silicon of 95–99% purity. About 55% of the world consumption of metallurgical purity silicon goes for production of aluminium-silicon alloys (silumin alloys) for aluminium part casts, mainly for use in the automotive industry. Silicon's importance in aluminium casting is that a significantly high amount (12%) of silicon in aluminium forms a eutectic mixture which solidifies with very little thermal contraction. This greatly reduces tearing and cracks formed from stress as casting alloys cool to solidity. Silicon also significantly improves the hardness and thus wear-resistance of aluminium.[62][63]
Usually, silicides are prepared by direct reaction of the elements. For example, the alkali metals and alkaline earth metals react with silicon or silicon oxide to give silicides. Nevertheless, even with these highly electropositive elements true silicon anions are not obtainable, and most of these compounds are semiconductors. For example, the alkali metal silicides (M+ ) 4(Si4− 4) contain pyramidal tricoordinate silicon in the Si4− 4 anion, isoeelctronic with white phosphorus, P4.[35][36] Metal-rich silicides tend to have isolated silicon atoms (e. g. Cu5Si); with increasing silicon content, catenation increases, resulting in isolated clusters of two (e. g. U3Si2) or four silicon atoms (e. g. [K+]4[Si4]4−) at first, followed by chains (e. g. CaSi), layers (e. g. CaSi2), or three-dimensional networks of silicon atoms spanning space (e. g. α-ThSi2) as the silicon content rises even higher.[35]
Surrounding the beam pipe is the silicon detector. This detector is used to track the path of charged particles as they travel through the detector. The silicon detector begins at a radius of "r" = 1.5 cm from the beam line and extends to a radius of "r" = 28 cm from the beam line. The silicon detector is composed of seven layers of silicon arranged in a barrel shape around the beam pipe. Silicon is often used in charged particle detectors because of its high sensitivity, allowing for high-resolution vertex and tracking. The first layer of silicon, known as Layer 00, is a single sided detector designed to separate signal from background even under extreme radiation. The remaining layers are double sided and radiation-hard, meaning that the layers are protected from damage from radioactivity. The silicon works to track the paths of charged particles as they pass through the detector by ionizing the silicon. The density of the silicon, coupled with the low ionization energy of silicon, allow ionization signals to travel quickly. As a particle travels through the silicon, its position will be recorded in 3 dimensions. The silicon detector has a track hit resolution of 10 μm, and impact parameter resolution of 30 μm. Physicists can look at this trail of ions and determine the path that the particle took. As the silicon detector is located within a magnetic field, the curvature of the path through the silicon allows physicists to calculate the momentum of the particle. More curvature means less momentum and vice versa.
A hybrid silicon laser is a semiconductor laser fabricated from both silicon and group III-V semiconductor materials. The hybrid silicon laser was developed to address the lack of a silicon laser to enable fabrication of low-cost, mass-producible silicon optical devices. The hybrid approach takes advantage of the light-emitting properties of III-V semiconductor materials combined with the process maturity of silicon to fabricate electrically driven lasers on a silicon wafer that can be integrated with other silicon photonic devices. 
The nitridation of silicon powder was developed in the 1950s, following the "rediscovery" of silicon nitride and was the first
large-scale method for powder production. However, use of low-purity raw silicon caused contamination of silicon nitride by silicates and iron. The diimide decomposition results in amorphous silicon nitride, which needs further annealing under nitrogen at 1400–1500 °C to convert it to crystalline powder; this is now the second-most important route for commercial production. The carbothermal reduction was the earliest used method for silicon nitride production and is now considered as the most-cost-effective industrial route to high-purity silicon nitride powder.
More precisely called polymerized siloxanes or polysiloxanes, silicones consist of an inorganic silicon-oxygen backbone chain (⋯-Si-O-Si-O-Si-O-⋯) with organic side groups attached to the silicon atoms. These silicon atoms are tetravalent. So, silicones are polymers constructed from inorganic-organic monomers. Silicones have in general the chemical formula [RSiO], where R is an organic group such as an alkyl (methyl, ethyl) or phenyl group.
Strained silicon is a layer of silicon in which the silicon atoms are stretched beyond their normal interatomic distance. This can be accomplished by putting the layer of silicon over a substrate of silicon germanium (). As the atoms in the silicon layer align with the atoms of the underlying silicon germanium layer (which are arranged a little farther apart, with respect to those of a bulk silicon crystal), the links between the silicon atoms become stretched - thereby leading to strained silicon. Moving these silicon atoms farther apart reduces the atomic forces that interfere with the movement of electrons through the transistors and thus better mobility, resulting in better chip performance and lower energy consumption. These electrons can move 70% faster allowing strained silicon transistors to switch 35% faster.
Silicon on insulator (SOI) technology refers to the use of a layered silicon–insulator–silicon substrate in place of conventional silicon substrates in semiconductor manufacturing, especially microelectronics, to reduce parasitic device capacitance, thereby improving performance. SOI-based devices differ from conventional silicon-built devices in that the silicon junction is above an electrical insulator, typically silicon dioxide or sapphire (these types of devices are called silicon on sapphire, or SOS). The choice of insulator depends largely on intended application, with sapphire being used for high-performance radio frequency (RF) and radiation-sensitive applications, and silicon dioxide for diminished short channel effects in microelectronics devices. The insulating layer and topmost silicon layer also vary widely with application.
In order for the silicon photonic components to remain optically independent from the bulk silicon of the wafer on which they are fabricated, it is necessary to have a layer of intervening material. This is usually silica, which has a much lower refractive index (of about 1.44 in the wavelength region of interest), and thus light at the silicon-silica interface will (like light at the silicon-air interface) undergo total internal reflection, and remain in the silicon. This construct is known as silicon on insulator. It is named after the technology of silicon on insulator in electronics, whereby components are built upon a layer of insulator in order to reduce parasitic capacitance and so improve performance.
Silicon nanotubes are nanoparticles which create a tube-like structure from silicon atoms. As with silicon nanowires, they are technologically important due to their unusual physical properties, which differ fundamentally to those of bulk silicon. First reports on silicon nanotubes appeared around the year 2000.
Nanocrystalline silicon (nc-Si), sometimes also known as "microcrystalline silicon" (μc-Si), is a form of porous silicon. It is an allotropic form of silicon with paracrystalline structure—is similar to amorphous silicon (a-Si), in that it has an amorphous phase. Where they differ, however, is that nc-Si has small grains of crystalline silicon within the amorphous phase. This is in contrast to polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) which consists solely of crystalline silicon grains, separated by grain boundaries. The difference comes solely from the grain size of the crystalline grains. Most materials with grains in the micrometre range are actually fine-grained polysilicon, so nanocrystalline silicon is a better term. The term Nanocrystalline silicon refers to a range of materials around the transition region from amorphous to microcrystalline phase in the silicon thin film.
The use of polycrystalline silicon in the production of solar cells requires less material and therefore provides higher profits and increased manufacturing throughput. Polycrystalline silicon does not need to be deposited on a silicon wafer to form a solar cell, rather it can be deposited on other-cheaper materials, thus reducing the cost. Not requiring a silicon wafer alleviates the silicon shortages occasionally faced by the microelectronics industry. An example of not using a silicon wafer is crystalline silicon on glass (CSG) materials 
Nanocrystalline silicon (nc-Si), sometimes also known as microcrystalline silicon (μc-Si), is a form of porous silicon. It is an allotropic form of silicon with paracrystalline structure—is similar to amorphous silicon (a-Si), in that it has an amorphous phase. Where they differ, however, is that nc-Si has small grains of crystalline silicon within the amorphous phase. This is in contrast to polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) which consists solely of crystalline silicon grains, separated by grain boundaries. The difference comes solely from the grain size of the crystalline grains. Most materials with grains in the micrometre range are actually fine-grained polysilicon, so nanocrystalline silicon is a better term. The term Nanocrystalline silicon refers to a range of materials around the transition region from amorphous to microcrystalline phase in the silicon thin film. The crystalline volume fraction (as measured from Raman spectroscopy) is another criterion to describe the materials in this transition zone.