silicon wafers

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The cost of creating solar cells

At the Always On Venture Summit in Half Moon Bay, Calif., a panel of solar energy executives debates whether or not silicon prices will fall as the industry matures. While they all think margins will narrow, they disagree on whether there will be an industry wide shakeout, or if the...

Tags: Managing Director, Silicon Wafer, Solar Cell, Solar Energy, Semiconductors, Telecom & Utilities, Hardware, solar, energy, cells, silicon, polysilicon, silicon wafers, green, enviromental

Videos 2008-12-04

Additional Resources

Not only green, efficient, but now cheaper

LEDs are the new plastic, the new black, the new new thing. Harvard has done research that will provide a much cheaper way to make the Gallium Nitride components that make LEDs what they are. I live out here in the boondocks and I'm already seeing LEDs with...

Tags: Light-emitting Diode, Harvard, Engineering, Harry Fuller

Blog posts 2009-01-30

Swiss solar firm has come ashore in the New World

Swiss solar firm has come ashore in the New Worldsmart & clean: grid parity within 24 monthsGiven the fact that the price for fossile fuels are constantly rising, solar energy is one of the most promising solutions to our dwelling energy problem. Within the Solar Market Thin film applications...

Tags: grid parity

Discussion threads 2008-07-01

Damn the recession, full speed ahead for a green tech IPO?

Courtesy GT Solar. There may be an interesting green tech IPO this year, recession or no. Interest among investors will be an indication to numerous green tech companies of their attractiveness. Especially the solar enmergy sector. Today it looks like a solar...

Tags: Green Technology, Wafer, GT Solar, IPO, Financial Planning, Investment, Semiconductors, Financial Services, Finance, Hardware, Harry Fuller

Blog posts 2008-02-14

Graphene-based transistors on the way?

The idea of replacing silicon with carbon to make computer chips is not new. However, using graphene -- a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice -- wasn't feasible because it is not possible today to make wafers as big as ones made from silicon. But two...

Tags: Technique, Researcher, Stamp, Transistor, Semiconductors, Productivity, Hardware, Roland Piquepaille

Blog posts 2007-12-19

U.S. leads in a green tech besides geothermal

Charts provided by EER. Because the U.S. energy use is so immense, it sometimes seems the whole country runs on fossil fuels. But t'ain't so. The U.S. is big in using geothermal energy. While much of Europe is looking to biodiesel, the...

Tags: Green Technology, Harry Fuller, Management, Spain, Strategy, U.S.

Blog posts 2007-12-12

Proposed solar plant not worth its salt?

Parts of Africa have an abundance of solar energy. Remember that NOAA gobalmap we showed you? It clearly shows that some of that blazing sun reaches into South Africa. So it seems like a plan to put a huge, world's largest they claim, solar-powered generating...

Tags: South Africa, Semiconductors, Telecom & Utilities, Hardware, Harry Fuller

Blog posts 2007-12-11

In search of...AMD quad-core Opterons

In search of...AMD quad-core OpteronsSomeone should investigate AMDIs it really possible that at the 11th hour they ended up discovering a problem which they should have caught in their labs during validation testing? Or is there something else going on here?What is it that they have communicated under NDA to...

Tags: Semiconductors, Tom, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., chip, Intel Corp.

Discussion threads 2007-12-03

IBM silicon rejects reborn in solar panels

Just a wafer thin. Yes, indeedy, when the Monty Python crew penned that infamous line in their movie, "Meaning of Life" that hadn't one iota of a clue what it could mean for the solar energy industry. And now, here's the point of this blog. There's word...

Tags: Wafer, Semiconductor, IBM Corp., Semiconductors, Manufacturing, Hardware, Heather Clancy

Blog posts 2007-10-31

Photos: Reclaiming silicon with water

IBM's eco-friendly process scrapes off circuitry from unusable wafers, which are then sold to the solar industry. by CNET News.com

Tags: Silicon, Circuitry, Wafer, Photograph, IBM Corp., Semiconductors, Hardware, CNET News.com

Image galleries 2007-10-29

Nanotechnology boosts solar cells performance

Physicists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign UIUC have improved the performance of solar cells by 60 percent. And they obtained this spectacular result by using a very simple trick. They've coated the solar cells with a film of 1-nanometer thick silicon fluorescing nanoparticles. The researchers also said that...

Tags: Silicon, Performance, Nanoparticle, Particle, Nanotechnology, Cell, Roland Piquepaille

Blog posts 2007-08-21

AMD versus Intel: CPU wars roadmap

Intel announced the next revolution in Microprocessor fabrication by replacing Silicon Dioxide gates with High-K dielectric metal gates. Microprocessor industry analyst David Kanter who contributed a lot of the information in this piece had this in-depth analysis on what this means for Intel and AMD. I spoke with...

Tags: Advanced Micro Devices Inc., AMD, Desktop, Hardware, Intel Corp., News, Processors, Servers

Blog posts 2007-01-30

Intel's business is not microprocessors, it is in monetizing Moore's Law

People mistake Intel for being a microprocessor manufacturer. Thats just an application of what it does best: it knows how to make the worlds most advanced chips in massive quantities.Late last week Intel briefed reporters and analysts on what is likely the most significant breakthrough in chip making since the...

Tags: Chip industry, Intel, Intel Corp., chip

Blog posts 2007-01-29

Great balls of fire

According to National Geographic News, two Brazilian physicists of the Federal University of Pernambuco have created artificial ball lightning in their lab. Like the ones you may have seen during a thunderstorm, these ball lightning move erratically and burn whatever they touch, even drilling a hole in one of the...

Tags: Energy &, Environment, Science &, Nature, ball lightning, lightning, vapor

Blog posts 2007-01-24

What's behind AMD's earnings warning?

AMD’s fourth quarter 2006 earnings warning is all about chip pricing. First, the background: AMD said in a Jan. 11 statement that its fourth quarter 2006 (4Q06) revenue, excluding its newly-acquired ATI business segments, would increase by 3% from the $1.33 billion it reported for 3Q06. But AMD...

Tags: Uncategorized, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Blog posts 2007-01-12

High-performance flexible organic transistors

Organic -- or carbon-based -- transistors are not new and can be used to design flexible computer displays, RFID tags and sensors. However, these organic single crystals could not be mass-produced because they needed to be individually handpicked. But now, researchers at Stanford University and the University of California-Los Angeles...

Tags: Semiconductors, high-performance, transistor, Stanford University

Blog posts 2006-12-17

More powerful solar cells

Today, solar cells are not a very efficient way to produce electricity, even if the source of energy is free. They can be manufactured from thick crystalline silicon wafers (300 microns thick) or thinner non-crystalline ones (about 2 microns thick). But 'thin' cells built are less efficient than 'thick' ones,...

Tags: solar cell, cell

Blog posts 2006-09-21

Intel slide not over yet says AMD sales chief

I've been writing about a revitalized Intel an SVW sponsor and its bid to win back market share with its Core 2 Duo chips and an ambitious roadmap. My view has been that AMD has had the party all to itself with its low-power consuming high-performance Opteron server chips--and now...

Tags: Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Intel Corp.

Blog posts 2006-09-11

Intel, Google and marketing gurus

This week Intel has been in the news as it has spilled news of Microsoft's Origami Project in a carefully orchestrated product and buzz build. Revealed at its semi-annual Developer Forum, the company has also tried to pump up its prospects a week after revealing a precipitous decline in...

Tags: Intel Corp.

Blog posts 2006-03-07

Faster plastic circuits for flexible computing

Flexible materials used to build electronic displays are not mainstream yet, even if new products are launched almost every week. Until today, they needed to be powered by processors which couldn't been implanted on the displays themselves. But now, Technology Review reports that thanks to research done at Sarnoff Corporation...

Tags: plastic circuit

Blog posts 2005-12-14