You knew what material I meant, didn't you? From the Internet:
"Silicon is a natural chemical element, silicone is a man-made product. The words are often used interchangeably but there are important differences. Whilst silicon is natural, silicone is a man-made polymer derived from silicon."
Silicone is derived from silicon. I don't think I'm too much off here.
You will have to accept that to many of us native English speakers, mixing up those two is a huge pet peeve. Even more so in electronics where a) silicon semiconductors are such a transformative technology, and b) we use
both of those things in the discipline, since we use silicon chips
and silicone rubbers, lubricants, and adhesives.
The “internet” claim that they’re often used interchangeability is true, but only in the sense that there are millions of examples of people using them in incontrovertibly incorrect ways. Frequent incorrect usage doesn’t mean it’s considered accepted or acceptable! (And this refers to both spelling and pronunciation, both of which get confused by the uneducated.)
Anyway, I have a silicone baking mat, and I barely use it because of how much dust it attracts — I have to scrub it down with soap and water every time I want to use it for food, because it WILL attract all the dust from seemingly the entire apartment even just sitting in a drawer. So I have been quite skeptical of those silicone soldering mats. Maybe the manufacturers are smart and included a conductive additive (the way that ESD mats use carbon added to the rubber), but I don’t know whether they do or not. As such, I would be reluctant to use one for soldering. I just use a regular rubber ESD mat, with a large piece of blank FR4 as a soldering “placemat” to protect the mat from heat damage.