Jean Hoerni attended the same 1958 Electrochemical Society meeting, and was intrigued by Mohamed Atalla's presentation of the surface passivation process. Hoerni came up with the "planar idea" one morning while thinking about Atalla's device.[40] Taking advantage of silicon dioxide's passivating effect on the silicon surface, Hoerni proposed to make transistors that were protected by a layer of silicon dioxide.[40] This led to the first successful product implementation of the Atalla-Tannenbaum-Scheibner silicon transistor passivation technique by thermal oxide.[47]