Article
Article
Glass switch
Article By:
Ovshinsky, Stanford R. Energy Conversion Devices, Inc., Troy, Michigan.
Adler, David Formerly, Department of Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Last reviewed:January 2020
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1036/1097-8542.290800
A glassy, solid-state device used to control the flow of electric current. Useful solid-state devices can be made from glassy as well as crystalline semiconductors. Crystals possess long-range order; that is, given the position of any particular atoms and the orientation of the neighboring atoms, the location of any other atom is known, no matter how far away from the atom under consideration. A glass is a special case of a noncrystalline class of materials, namely, amorphous solids. These do not exhibit long-range order, although they tend to have the same local structure (that is, short-range order) as the corresponding crystal. A glass is an amorphous solid that is formed by cooling rapidly from the liquid phase.
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