Category Archives: Applications

Despite a slightly down first quarter, the semiconductor industry achieved near record growth in the second quarter of 2017, posting a 6.1 percent growth from the previous quarter, according to IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO). Global revenue came in at $101.4 billion, up from $95.6 billion in the first quarter of 2017. This is the highest growth the industry has seen in the second quarter since 2014.

The memory chip market set records in the second quarter, growing 10.7 percent to a new high of $30.2 billion with DRAM and NOR flash memory leading the charge, growing 14 percent and 12.3 percent quarter-on-quarter, respectively.

“The DRAM market had another quarter of record revenues on the strength of higher prices and growth in shipments,” said Mike Howard, director for DRAM memory and storage at IHS Markit. “Anxiety about product availability in the previous third and fourth quarters weighed on the industry. This led many DRAM buyers to build inventory — putting additional pressure on the already tight market. This year is shaping up to smash all DRAM revenue records and will easily pass the $60 billion mark.”

“For NOR, the supply-demand balance has tightened raising average selling prices and revenue,” said Clifford Leimbach, senior analyst for memory and storage at IHS Markit. “This mature memory technology has been in a steady decline for many years, but some market suppliers are reducing supply or leaving the market, which has tightened supply recently, resulting in the increase of revenue.”

In terms of application, consumer electronics and data processing saw the most growth, increasing in revenue by 7.9 percent and 6.8 percent, respectively, quarter-on-quarter. A lot of this growth can be attributed to the continual growth in memory pricing, as supply still remains tight.

Industrial semiconductors showed the third highest growth rate at 6.4 percent during the same period. This growth can be attributable to multiple segments, such as commercial and military avionics, digital signage, network video surveillance, HVAC, smart meters, traction, PV inverters, LED lighting and medical electronics including cardiac equipment, hearing aids and imaging systems.

Another trend in the industrial market is increasing factory automation, which alone is driving growth for discrete power transistors, thyristors, rectifiers and power diodes. The market for these devices is expected to reach $8 billion in 2021, up from $5.7 billion in 2015.

Intel remains the number one semiconductor supplier in the world, followed by Samsung Electronics by a slight margin. IHS Markit does not include foundry operations and other non-semiconductor revenue in the semiconductor market rankings.

Among the top 20 semiconductor suppliers, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and nVidia achieved the highest revenue growth quarter over quarter by 24.7 percent and 14.6 percent, respectively. There was no market share movement in the top 10 semiconductor suppliers. However, seven of the 10 companies in the 11 to 20 market share slots did change market share.

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Researchers at Caltech have developed a prototype miniature medical device that could ultimately be used in “smart pills” to diagnose and treat diseases. A key to the new technology–and what makes it unique among other microscale medical devices–is that its location can be precisely identified within the body, something that proved challenging before.

“The dream is that we will have microscale devices that are roaming our bodies and either diagnosing problems or fixing things,” says Azita Emami, the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering and Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator, who co-led the research along with Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator Mikhail Shapiro. “Before now, one of the challenges was that it was hard to tell where they are in the body.”

A paper describing the new device appears in the September issue of the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. The lead author is Manuel Monge (MS ’10, PhD ’17), who was a doctoral student in Emami’s lab and a Rosen Bioengineering Center Scholar at Caltech, and now works at a company called Neuralink. Audrey Lee-Gosselin, a research technician in Shapiro’s lab, is also an author.

Called ATOMS, which is short for addressable transmitters operated as magnetic spins, the new silicon-chip devices borrow from the principles of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), in which the location of atoms in a patient’s body is determined using magnetic fields. The microdevices would also be located in the body using magnetic fields–but rather than relying on the body’s atoms, the chips contain a set of integrated sensors, resonators, and wireless transmission technology that would allow them to mimic the magnetic resonance properties of atoms.

Illustration of an ATOMS microchip localized within the gastrointestinal tract. The chip, which works on principles similar to those used in MRI machines, is embodied with the properties of nuclear spin. Credit: Ella Marushchenko for Caltech

Illustration of an ATOMS microchip localized within the gastrointestinal tract. The chip, which works on principles similar to those used in MRI machines, is embodied with the properties of nuclear spin. Credit: Ella Marushchenko for Caltech

“A key principle of MRI is that a magnetic field gradient causes atoms at two different locations to resonate at two different frequencies, making it easy to tell where they are,” says Shapiro. “We wanted to embody this elegant principle in a compact integrated circuit. The ATOMS devices also resonate at different frequencies depending on where they are in a magnetic field.”

“We wanted to make this chip very small with low power consumption, and that comes with a lot of engineering challenges,” says Emami. “We had to carefully balance the size of the device with how much power it consumes and how well its location can be pinpointed.”

The researchers say the devices are still preliminary but could one day serve as miniature robotic wardens of our bodies, monitoring a patient’s gastrointestinal tract, blood, or brain. The devices could measure factors that indicate the health of a patient–such as pH, temperature, pressure, sugar concentrations–and relay that information to doctors. Or, the devices could even be instructed to release drugs.

“You could have dozens of microscale devices traveling around the body taking measurements or intervening in disease. These devices can all be identical, but the ATOMS devices would allow you to know where they all are and talk to all of them at once,” says Shapiro. He compares it to the 1966 sci-fi movie Fantastic Voyage, in which a submarine and its crew are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the bloodstream of a patient to heal him from the inside–but, as Shapiro says, “instead of sending a single submarine, you could send a flotilla.”

The idea for ATOMS came about at a dinner party. Shapiro and Emami were discussing their respective fields–Shapiro engineers cells for medical imaging techniques, such as MRI, and Emami creates microchips for medical sensing and performing actions in the body–when they got the idea of combining their interests into a new device. They knew that locating microdevices in the body was a long-standing challenge in the field and realized that combining Shapiro’s knowledge in MRI technology with Emami’s expertise in creating microdevices could potentially solve the problem. Monge was enlisted to help realize the idea in the form of a silicon chip.

“This chip is totally unique: there are no other chips that operate on these principles,” says Monge. “Integrating all of the components together in a very small device while keeping the power low was a big task.” Monge did this research as part of his PhD thesis, which was recently honored with the Charles Wilts Prize by Caltech’s Department of Electrical Engineering.

The final prototype chip, which was tested and proven to work in mice, has a surface area of 1.4 square millimeters, 250 times smaller than a penny. It contains a magnetic field sensor, integrated antennas, a wireless powering device, and a circuit that adjusts its radio frequency signal based on the magnetic field strength to wirelessly relay the chip’s location.

“In conventional MRI, all of these features are intrinsically found in atoms,” says Monge. “We had to create an architecture that functionally mimics them for our chip.”

While the current prototype chip can relay its location in the body, the next step is to build one that can both relay its location and sense body states.

“We want to build a device that can go through the gastrointestinal tract and not only tell us where it is but communicate information about the various parts of the body and how they are doing.”

UPMEM, a fabless semiconductor startup company, announces UPMEM Processing In-Memory (PIM), the next generation hardware solution for data intensive applications in the datacenter, solving server-level efficiency and performance bottlenecks. UPMEM’s programmer friendly acceleration technology is much awaited for by big data players as Moore’s law is fading away.

“The new generation of data intensive applications can no longer be easily handled by traditional CPUs,” said Gilles Hamou, CEO and co-founder of UPMEM. “Initial benchmarks by our partners validate the game-changing added-value of UPMEM PIM technology, as well as the strong fit of its programming model for a large scope of real world data-intensive applications.”

The PIM chip, integrating UPMEM’s proprietary RISC processors (DRAM Processing Units, DPUs) and main memory (DRAM), is the building block of the first efficient, scalable and programmable acceleration solution for big data applications. Associated with its Software Development Kit, the UPMEM PIM solution can accelerate data-intensive applications in the datacenter servers 20 times, with close to zero additional energy premium. This huge leap opens new horizons for Big Data players, in terms of costs and new services.

“Faster and more efficient data analytics require new datacentric application architectures, positioning compute nearer the data,” said Western Digital iMemory Project leader Robin O’Neill. “The UPMEM Processing In-Memory solution is particularly relevant and highly promising for a variety of data analytics use cases, without dramatic changes to server architectures.”

UPMEM’s innovative technology solves the Memory Wall and the dominant energy cost of data movement between the processor and its main memory in application servers. Thousands of UPMEM in-memory co-processors (DRAM Processing Units, aka DPUs) orchestrated by the main processor, localize most of data processing in the memory chips, while proposing familiar programmability. Besides, the UPMEM solution comes without any disruption of existing server hardware, standardized protocols, programming & compiling schemes, removing any barrier for fast & massive adoption. For instance, the UPMEM solution provides a full DNA mapping and variance analysis in minutes instead of hours, making affordable real-time personalized genomics a reality.

The financing round will enable the company to produce and bring to market its disruptive Processing In-Memory (PIM) chip-based solution. In parallel, UPMEM will accelerate its evaluation programs with top tier global big data customers and IT labs, using available programming and simulation tools.

UPMEM obtained this series A financing from actors engaged in semiconductors and with a strong footprint in Europeand the US: C4Ventures, Partech Ventures, Supernova Invest, Western Digital Capital, Crédit Agricole bank, and entrepreneurs from the data center and micro electronics industry led by Etix CEO Charles-Antoine Beyney. Reza Malekzadeh from Partech Ventures and Charles-Antoine Beyney will join the UPMEM board of directors.

“Data intensive use cases are severally constrained by the Memory Wall issue,” explains Olivier Huez, Partner at C4 Ventures. “We’ve looked far and wide and UPMEM’s founders have built the only company on the market which can address this seamlessly and deliver such an impressive uplift in performance.”

“We are no longer in an era were CPUs and other hardware getting continuously faster would mask the slow speed of inefficient software,” said Reza Malekzadeh, General Partner at Partech Ventures. “UPMEM’s solution addresses the performance needs of modern scale-out applications while preserving datacenter and infrastructure hardware investments.”

“The PIM concept is not new in itself,” said Christophe Desrumaux, Investment Director at Supernova Invest. “But UPMEM brings together a world class team, an innovative patented approach without any hardware compatibility disruption, and a full set of design tools that make it widely adoptable by users.”

Lam Research Corporation (Nasdaq:LRCX), a global supplier of innovative wafer fabrication equipment and services to the semiconductor industry, announced that it has completed the acquisition of Coventor, Inc., a provider of simulation and modeling solutions for semiconductor process technology, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), and the Internet of Things (IoT). The combination of Lam and Coventor supports Lam’s advanced process control vision and is expected to accelerate process integration simulation to increase the value of virtual processing, further enabling chipmakers to address some of their most significant technical challenges.

“We see a strong synergy between our modeling capability and Lam’s desire to enable virtual experimentation of process development for customers and within its business units,” said Mike Jamiolkowski, president and CEO of Coventor. “We believe that our combination will increase the value we can deliver to our customers by providing more capability and improving their time to market.”

Customers rely on Coventor software and expertise to help predict the structures and behavior of designs before committing to time-consuming and costly wafer fabrication. This fast and accurate “virtual fabrication” allows technology developers and manufacturers to understand process variation effects early in the development timeframe and reduce the number of silicon learning cycles required to bring a successful product to market.

“We are looking forward to Coventor being a part of Lam and increasing the value and contribution we jointly provide to our customers,” said Rick Gottscho, executive vice president and corporate chief technical officer of Lam Research. “To keep pace with future design requirements, new technologies such as virtual fabrication and processing will be crucial to improve time to market. Together, our collective goal is to deliver more simulation, more virtual fabrication, and an overall increase in computational techniques to support the development of next-generation transistors, memories, MEMS and IoT devices.”

Healthcare is facing one of its major turning points in decades. After penetrating the consumer market, the digital revolution and its related IoT concept is rapidly changing health models.
Yole Développement’s analysts announce an impressive US$9 billion market in 2016 with a 16% CAGR between 2016 and 2022. Connected devices are now part of the IoT industry: the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is born. Such developments have been performed in parallel of the numerous technical innovations dedicated to the consumer applications.

Yole Développement (Yole) releases today the report Connected Medical Devices Market & Business Models. This report analyzes the dynamics of the connected medical devices market, the competitive landscape and its technical innovations. It also details the drivers for the adoption of connected medical devices as well as devices for personal assistance. Trends for connectivity and typical architecture for an IoMT project and much more are presented in this report.
The IoMT powers industry momentum in digital health and reinvents healthcare organization. The Medical Technology team from Yole offers you today an overview of the latest innovations and their impact on our daily life. What will be the tomorrow’s healthcare?

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The population is growing and aging, and chronic diseases are exploding. More than 415 million people are living with diabetes worldwide and there are more than 1.5 billion people at risk of cardiovascular diseases. The number of doctors and nurses has stayed consistently flat, as health budgets are shrinking in many regions. Fortunately, connected devices and smartphones are now widespread. People are managing their lives through apps and clouds, and now can do the same with their health, from hospital to home or even just walking in the street.

Healthcare is shifting to a patient centric model with nearly 20% growth over the period to 2022 for the segment of self-quantified devices. This compares to single-digit growth for connected implantable devices, which face serious security issues. Preventive and predictive medicine and even participative medicine are on the way to supplement evidence-based approaches, using the large volumes of data generated by these connected medical devices.

Technical developments for the medical sector were made in parallel to consumer applications. However, introduction of these “connected innovations” was longer due to regulation aspect in healthcare as well as longer development time and test to clearance.

“Convergence of sensor technology and connectivity made possible the set-up of IoT,” asserts Jérôme Mouly, Technology & Market Analyst, Medical Technologies at Yole. “Today, when connected devices are medical-grade approved, we can talk about IoMT. And this is the focus of Yole’s report”.

Bringing connectivity to medical devices has offered new experience to patient and health body: self-monitoring, alerts, patient coaching, exchange and storage of data, records at local level. Therefore, IoMT infrastructure clearly offers a wide opportunity to store millions of data from several devices, from several patients. “We are just at the beginning of data exploitation for the benefit of patients”, comments Jérôme Mouly from Yole.

According to Yole’s report, the connected medical devices market is structured within 4 market segments, each one with dedicated requirements and challenges front of connectivity. They are implantable devices – self-monitored – professional oriented – and assistance devices for people’s lacking autonomy.

The healthcare industry is changing smoothly and connected medical devices will slightly impose their presence. For example, chronic diseases are strongly driving connected medical device market with more than 80% of sales generated by monitoring of diabetes, respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The connected medical devices penetration rate for chronic diseases is yet reaching 20%+ from comparable market.

These applications will not be the last one. Indeed connected technologies will continue to impact the healthcare industry with always the same objective: move towards an efficient, accurate and personalized healthcare for the benefit of patient.

Lama Nachman will share Intel‘s story of using contextually aware computing to improve assistive technology for Stephen Hawking during her keynote at the 13th annual MEMS & Sensors Executive Congress(November 1-2, 2017 in Napa Valley, Calif.). Hosted by MEMS & Sensors Industry Group®(MSIG), the event also features NXP‘s Lars Reger exploring the critical role of MEMS and non-MEMS sensors in the complex automotive ecosystems of today and tomorrow. Other speakers will address diverse topics spanning ingestible sensors that leverage integrated circuits (ICs), MEMS spectral sensors that improve crop yields, low-power acoustic sensing platforms for always-on voice-activated products, and thin-film pressure-sensitive tiles used for gait and performance analysis.

“Understanding the essential role of MEMS and sensors in integrated systems, such as smart home, smart automotive, smart biomedical/wellness and smart industrial, is critical to extracting maximum value from these devices, which market research firm Yole Développement expects to grow from $38 billion in 2016 to $66 billion in 2021,” said Karen Lightman, vice president, MSIG, a SEMI Strategic Association Partner. “From our keynote speakers to our featured presenters and panelists, MEMS & Sensors Executive Congress speakers will delve into some of the most exciting ways that MEMS and sensors add intelligence and insight to integrated systems.”

Other Highlights

  • Emerging MEMS & Sensors: Technologies to Watch ─ Alissa Fitzgerald, A.M. Fitzgerald & Associates
  • MEMS & Sensors: Outtakes of 2017 and Outlook for 2018 ─ Jérémie Bouchaud, IHS Markit
  • BioMEMS: The Next Big Thing for MEMS Players? ─ Sébastien Clerc, Yole Développement
  • Fireside Chat with Industry VCs ─ Wen Hsieh of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byersand Rudy Burger of Woodside Capital Partners
  • Featured “Tech Talks” on “Creating Six Senses” ─ styled in the manner of TED Talks™, these short talks feature Marcellino Gemelli of Bosch Sensortec and Peter Hartwell of InvenSense/TDK

For conference registration, please visit: www.semi.org/en/mems-sensors-executive-congress-agenda-register. Register by September 26 for a discount.

 

FlexTech, a SEMI strategic association partner, will host a one-day Flexible Hybrid Electronics and Sensors Automotive Industry workshop in Detroit, Michigan on September 13, 2017 to explore how FHE adds functionality, decreases weight and impacts design. Automotive and electronics industry leaders will gather to discuss the market demands and challenges with automotive technology and present disruptive changes brought by flexible hybrid electronics (FHE) and sensors.

The forum will breakdown the topic into four key areas: OEM applications; market analysis and forecasts; challenges to integration; and solutions for Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers. Speakers include representatives from SBD Automotive, Fiat-Chrysler Group LLC, Velodyne LiDAR, Lumitex, Alpha Micron, NextFlex, Auburn University, Universal Instruments, Interlink Electronics, Georgia Institute of Technology, DuPont Photovoltaics & Advanced Materials and more.

“This forum is an excellent opportunity to discover the possibilities of flexible electronic systems incorporating advanced semiconductors, MEMS, and sensors, which will provide lightweight, sensor networks that conform, curve, and possibly more.  New automotive applications in this area will enable wholly new approaches for the in-cabin driving experience,” said Dr. Melissa Grupen-Shemansky, CTO for Flexible Electronics & Advanced Packaging at SEMI | FlexTech.

Company tours to Ford and a networking dinner are scheduled for September 12, 2017. For more information on the forum and how to register visit the event websiteat www.semi/org/en/FHE-forum-summary.

Leti today announced that the European R&D project known as PiezoMAT has developed a pressure-based fingerprint sensor that enables resolution more than twice as high as currently required by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The project’s proof of concept demonstrates that a matrix of interconnected piezoelectric zinc-oxide (ZnO) nanowires grown on silicon can reconstruct the smallest features of human fingerprints at 1,000 dots per inch (DPI).

“The pressure-based fingerprint sensor derived from the integration of piezo-electric ZnO nanowires grown on silicon opens the path to ultra-high resolution fingerprint sensors, which will be able to reach resolution much higher than 1,000 DPI,” said Antoine Viana, Leti’s project manager. “This technology holds promise for significant improvement in both security and identification applications.”

The eight-member project team of European companies, universities and research institutes fabricated a demonstrator embedding a silicon chip with 250 pixels, and its associated electronics for signal collection and post-processing. The chip was designed to demonstrate the concept and the major technological achievements, not the maximum potential nanowire integration density. Long-term development will pursue full electronics integration for optimal sensor resolution.

 

The project also provided valuable experience and know-how in several key areas, such as optimization of seed-layer processing, localized growth of well-oriented ZnO nanowires on silicon substrates, mathematical modeling of complex charge generation, and synthesis of new polymers for encapsulation. The research and deliverables of the project have been presented in scientific journals and at conferences, including Eurosensors 2016 in Budapest.

The 44-month, €2.9 million PiezoMAT (PIEZOelectric nanowire MATrices) research project was funded by the European Commission in the Seventh Framework Program. Its partners include:

  • Leti (Grenoble, France): A leading European center in the field of microelectronics, microtechnology and nanotechnology R&D, Leti is one of the three institutes of the Technological Research Division at CEA, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. Leti’s activities span basic and applied research up to pilot industrial lines. www.leti-cea.com/cea-tech/leti/english 
  • Fraunhofer IAF (Freiburg, Germany): Fraunhofer IAF, one of the leading research facilities worldwide in the field of III-V semiconductors, develops electronic and optical devices based on modern micro- and nanostructures. Fraunhofer IAF’s technologies find applications in areas such as security, energy, communication, health, and mobility. www.iaf.fraunhofer.de/en
  • Centre for Energy Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest, Hungary):  The Institute for Technical Physics and Materials Science, one of the institutes of the Research Centre, conducts interdisciplinary research on complex functional materials and nanometer-scale structures, exploration of physical, chemical, and biological principles, and their exploitation in integrated micro- and nanosystems www.mems.hu, www.energia.mta.hu/en
  • Universität Leipzig (Leipzig, Germany): Germany’s second-oldest university with continuous teaching, established in 1409, hosts about 30,000 students in liberal arts, medicine and natural sciences. One of its scientific profiles is “Complex Matter”, and contributions to PIEZOMAT are in the field of nanostructures and wide gap materials. www.zv.uni-leipzig.de/en/
  • Kaunas University of Technology (Kaunas, Lithuania): One of the largest technical universities in the Baltic States, focusing its R&D activities on novel materials, smart devices, advanced measurement techniques and micro/nano-technologies. The Institute of Mechatronics specializes on multi-physics simulation and dynamic characterization of macro/micro-scale transducers with well-established expertise in the field of piezoelectric devices. http://en.ktu.lt/ 
  • SPECIFIC POLYMERS (Castries, France): SME with twelve employees and an annual turnover of about 1M€, SPECIFIC POLYMERS acts as an R&D service provider and scale-up producer in the field of functional polymers with high specificity (>1000 polymers in catalogue; >500 customers; >50 countries). www.specificpolymers.fr/
  • Tyndall National Institute (Cork, Ireland): Tyndall National Institute is one of Europe’s leading research centres in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) research and development and the largest facility of its type in Ireland. The Institute employs over 460 researchers, engineers and support staff, with a full-time graduate cohort of 135 students. With a network of 200 industry partners and customers worldwide, Tyndall generates around €30M income each year, 85% from competitively won contracts nationally and internationally. Tyndall is a globally leading Institute in its four core research areas of Photonics, Microsystems, Micro/Nanoelectronics and Theory, Modeling and Design. www.tyndall.ie/
  • OT-Morpho (Paris, France): OT-Morpho is a world leader in digital security & identification technologies with the ambition to empower citizens and consumers alike to interact, pay, connect, commute, travel and even vote in ways that are now possible in a connected world. As our physical and digital, civil and commercial lifestyles converge, OT-Morpho stands precisely at that crossroads to leverage the best in security and identity technologies and offer customized solutions to a wide range of international clients from key industries, including Financial services, Telecom, Identity, Security and IoT. With close to €3bn in revenues and more than 14,000 employees, OT-Morpho is the result of the merger between OT (Oberthur Technologies) and Safran Identity & Security (Morpho) completed in 31 May 2017. Temporarily designated by the name “OT-Morpho”, the new company will unveil its new name in September 2017. For more information, visit www.morpho.com and www.oberthur.com

Packing tiny solar cells together, like micro-lenses in the compound eye of an insect, could pave the way to a new generation of advanced photovoltaics, say Stanford University scientists.

In a new study, the Stanford team used the insect-inspired design to protect a fragile photovoltaic material called perovskite from deteriorating when exposed to heat, moisture or mechanical stress. The results are published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science (E&ES).

A compound solar cell illuminated from a light source below. Hexagonal scaffolds are visible in the regions coated by a silver electrode. The new solar cell design could help scientists overcome a major roadblock to the development of perovskite photovoltaics. Credit: Dauskardt Lab/Stanford University

A compound solar cell illuminated from a light source below. Hexagonal scaffolds are visible in the regions coated by a silver electrode. The new solar cell design could help scientists overcome a major roadblock to the development of perovskite photovoltaics. Credit: Dauskardt Lab/Stanford University

“Perovskites are promising, low-cost materials that convert sunlight to electricity as efficiently as conventional solar cells made of silicon,” said Reinhold Dauskardt, a professor of materials science and engineering and senior author of the study. “The problem is that perovskites are extremely unstable and mechanically fragile. They would barely survive the manufacturing process, let alone be durable long-term in the environment.”

Most solar devices, like rooftop panels, use a flat, or planar, design. But that approach doesn’t work well with perovskite solar cells.

“Perovskites are the most fragile materials ever tested in the history of our lab,” said graduate student Nicholas Rolston, a co-lead author of the E&ES study. “This fragility is related to the brittle, salt-like crystal structure of perovskite, which has mechanical properties similar to table salt.”

Eye of the fly

To address the durability challenge, the Stanford team turned to nature.

“We were inspired by the compound eye of the fly, which consists of hundreds of tiny segmented eyes,” Dauskardt explained. “It has a beautiful honeycomb shape with built-in redundancy: If you lose one segment, hundreds of others will operate. Each segment is very fragile, but it’s shielded by a scaffold wall around it.”

Using the compound eye as a model, the researchers created a compound solar cell consisting of a vast honeycomb of perovskite microcells, each encapsulated in a hexagon-shaped scaffold just 0.02 inches (500 microns) wide.

“The scaffold is made of an inexpensive epoxy resin widely used in the microelectronics industry,” Rolston said. “It’s resilient to mechanical stresses and thus far more resistant to fracture.”

Tests conducted during the study revealed that the scaffolding had little effect on the perovskite’s ability to convert light into electricity.

“We got nearly the same power-conversion efficiencies out of each little perovskite cell that we would get from a planar solar cell,” Dauskardt said. “So we achieved a huge increase in fracture resistance with no penalty for efficiency.”

Durability

But could the new device withstand the kind of heat and humidity that conventional rooftop solar panels endure?

To find out, the researchers exposed encapsulated perovskite cells to temperatures of 185 degrees Fahrenheit (85 degrees Celsius) and 85 percent relative humidity for six weeks. Despite these extreme conditions, the cells continued to generate electricity at relatively high rates of efficiency.

Dauskardt and his colleagues have filed a provisional patent for the new technology. To improve efficiency, they are studying new ways to scatter light from the scaffold into the perovskite core of each cell.

“We are very excited about these results,” he said. “It’s a new way of thinking about designing solar cells. These scaffold cells also look really cool, so there are some interesting aesthetic possibilities for real-world applications.”

STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM) has strengthened its ecosystem through a Partner Program that connects customers with qualified technical specialists capable of strategically supporting their projects.

The new ST Partner Program helps customers’ design teams access extra skills, products, and services to aid engineering development and shorten time-to-market for new products. While searching ST parts, solutions, and resources online, customers can at the same time identify approved Program members with competencies related to the chosen products. These competencies can be in Cloud services, associated Components or Modules, embedded Software, Engineering services, Development tools, or Training services. This info is also centralized in a dedicated partner area on the ST website at www.st.com/partners.

“The ST Partner Program provides fast introductions to trusted partners able to supply expertise to critical design projects. We evaluate program applicants to ensure that all partners are committed to offering consistently high-quality services,” said Alessandro Maloberti, Partner Ecosystem Director, STMicroelectronics. “The Program is designed to encourage product developers to choose even more components, modules, embedded software, and tools from the broad portfolio available at st.com to start their new product designs.”

Potential partners can apply to join the ST Partner Program via web registration. A complete framework covering technical, marketing, legal, and business aspects protects partners and ensures high service quality for customers. New, formalized partner benefits include enhanced marketing support from ST, which may include promotion in the ST Community and ST YouTube channel, the right to use the ST Partner Program logo and communication materials, as well as exposure to ST’s global customer base of engineers and purchasers from leading high-tech brands, manufacturing-service providers, and independent engineers and designers.

Going forward, ST will introduce more ways for its partners to engage, including co-marketing activities, sharing design opportunities, training, and networking events.