With its 95% share of the world's gallium arsenide semiconductor market, its chips steer Tomahawk missiles.
The San Jose company, founded in 2002, makes solar panels using copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) solar cells.
Many optical components are typically constructed using materials such as gallium arsenide and indium phosphide.
They decided to repossess the gallium to raise money to pay miners' salaries, they claimed.
Gallium arsenide, a more expensive but superior semiconductor, will replace silicon in at least some cases.
Yet even at this early stage he thinks gallium nitride-on-silicon LEDs would make commercial sense.
Most of the white LEDs now on the market are based on gallium nitride.
In its solid form, gallium is not very metallic, and therefore not very reflective.
Nakamura created the LED out of gallium-nitride, which became the semiconductor for making white LED lights today.
C. concern that turned TRW's gallium arsenide semiconductors, designed for spy satellites, into chips for cell phones.
"There's not anything that I hold against any other teams that did use gallium cells, " he said.
Gallium Arsenide and Gallium Nitride are preferred for LEDs, certain photovoltaics, and some very high frequency radio applications.
The three main types of thin film technologies use cadmium-telluride, copper-indium-gallium-selenide and amorphous-silicon to convert sunlight into electricity.
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He noted that Michigan uses gallium arsenide multi-junction photovoltaic cells on their car.
Using more efficient semiconductors, such as gallium arsenide, which is currently too expensive for anyone except NASA, is another.
The gallium cells can provide almost 50 percent more power than silicon photovoltaic cells, but are nearly twice as expensive.
Darshni Pillay, operations manager for the University of Calgary Solar Car Team, disagreed about the advantage provided by the gallium cells.
LaserMotive uses special cells made with arsenic and gallium, which are better able to capture the near-infra-red wavelengths of its laser beam.
Kim said his staff has figured out a way to create the desirable combination of gallium-nitride top layer on a gallium-nitride substrate.
The gallium-arsenide cells use low-cost lenses to concentrate sunlight on tiny cells.
Gallium, again, expensive and we only make 60 or so tonnes a year but we could expand production very simply and easily.
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Principia and a number of other teams also use the gallium cells.
But there are no reserves, not a single gramme, of gallium around.
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Liquid gallium, on the other hand, is metallic, and thus correspondingly reflective.
The files detail an amplifier device using gallium nitride (GaN), technology that has both commercial and potential military uses, according to the FT.
Sol Voltaics uses data from its indium phosphide nanowire research to project that its gallium arsenide nanowires will deliver a 25% efficiency gain.
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So the next step for Sol Voltaics will be to produce solar cells topped with gallium arsenide nanowires to further demonstrate its technology.
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Gallium nitride, or GaN, converts electrical impulses to light and is grown on the surface of wafers made from sapphire or silicon carbide.
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Using a micron-thick layer of gallium arsenide, it can get flexible solar cells that are 29 percent efficient, nearly double commodity silicon cells.
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But the biggest cost reduction will come from breakthroughs like that recently made by the Centre for Gallium Nitride at Cambridge University, England.
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