The analyst thinks over-supply will pressure prices of both silicon wafers and solar modules.
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Chinese makers of the silicon wafers that conduct electricity directly from sunlight proliferated and prospered.
We devised a breakthrough a few years ago that allows us to grow GaN-on-Silicon wafers.
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Silicon wafers, used to manufacture solar devices, is also a main component in the semiconductor industry.
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"We'd like to move one ton of silicon wafers through a line in an hour, " Gay says.
Meanwhile, DigiTimes in a separate story reports that the quake could disrupt suppliers of silicon wafers.
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By switching from sapphire to silicon wafers, the wafer size jumps from two or four inches to eight inches.
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One of these involves shooting oxygen ions (electrically charged atoms) into the silicon wafers from which chips are subsequently cut.
The company makes solar cells and silicon wafers used in solar panels.
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While at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1990s they experimented with thimble-size reactors etched into silicon wafers to produce toxic chemicals.
Semiconductors are manufactured on silicon wafers and the cost of a processed wafer is about the same no matter what you build on it.
Most electronics are made in the form of integrated circuits, which are tiny chips that contain transistors and other components etched onto silicon wafers.
Suntech Power Holdings ( STP - news - people ) (17, STP) , also Chinese, is the largest maker of solar cells using silicon wafers.
Both the spin valves and the paraphernalia of channels needed to feed a sample to them are built onto silicon wafers using the same techniques employed to make microprocessors.
But last year solar cell manufacturers bought more silicon wafers than chipmakers--and solar's demand for wafers is growing three times as fast as demand from the rest of the electronics industry.
Unlike them, it does not involve expensive silicon wafers.
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All this is necessary to produce the infinitely small patterns on the silicon wafers (like the one I am holding in the photo) that end up becoming transistors interconnected into elaborate circuits.
The first phase of the solar mission stipulated that solar farm operators using silicon wafers should only buy made-in-India versions of this equipment but allowed them to import other forms of technology, including thin-film cells.
Another such story, related to me by Steve Blank in a recent interview, recounts a desperate situation for another pioneering Silicon Valley electronics manufacturer: Its recipe for doping (preparing) silicon wafers had stopped working.
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But it will do so on conventional, cheap silicon wafers without the need for the modified wafers or ultra-thin channels required by the SOI consortium, a trick it accomplishes by adding a second gate beneath the channel.
Then there is the Chinese billionaire nicknamed Light: Xiaofeng Peng, 33, who got into solar energy in 2005 and took his company, LDK Solar, which makes silicon wafers used in solar panels, public on NYSE Euronext two years later.
This high efficiency PV technology allows Suntech to achieve conversion efficiency rates in the range of 18% to 19% on PV cells manufactured with monocrystalline silicon wafers and 16.5% to 17.5% on PV cells manufactured with multicrystalline silicon wafers.
At the risk of being too simplistic to make silicon wafers, which is what you use to make computer chips and solar cells, you take a great big ingot of very pure silicon metal and then slice it very thinly.
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Starting with two silicon wafers, Soitec machines coat the surface of one with silicon dioxide insulator and embed inside it a thin fault line of hydrogen atoms anywhere from 100 to 20, 000 nanometers below the surface, depending on customers' desired wafer thickness.
What Colin Humphreys and his colleagues at Cambridge have come up with is a reliable way to deposit gallium nitride on much cheaper silicon wafers, which they estimate could cut production costs to a tenth of what they are at the moment.
Meanwhile, other companies, such as GCL-Poly Energy, which is among the largest maker of silicon and silicon wafers (for making solar cells) in the world, are willing to expand production and lose money for a while in order to gain market share, Mehta said.
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The hand, which is said to be a "feat of microscale mechanical systems (MEMS), " measures just one millimeter across when closed into a fist, features four "fingers" made of six silicon wafers each, and touts four gas-powered balloons acting as the muscles at the wafers' joints.
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In LCDs silane gas breaks down into a film of silicon that forms the transistors that stimulate the pixels in the screen. (Flat-panel screens are essentially large semiconductor devices that sit on pieces of glass rather than on silicon wafers.) Another gas, nitrogen trifluoride, cleans the chambers in which both chips and LCDs are made.
It makes silicon solar wafers and photovoltaic cells and builds and runs solar power stations.
The other established approach is to take two wafers of silicon, coat each with a thin layer of glass on one side (which is done by baking them in oxygen), and then fuse them together to produce a silicon-glass-silicon sandwich.
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