Category Archives: SST

MTPV received the Top Pitch award for its breakthrough technology for converting heat to electricity using semiconductor chips as judged by several industry professionals, strategic partners and investors at SEMICON West’s Silicon Innovation Summit held in July of this year. Following a selective application process, MTPV and several other companies were selected to present their innovative technologies at the Summit.

MTPV creates semiconductor chips that covert heat directly into electricity. Much like a solar panel will convert sunlight into electricity, MTPV chips are able to convert any source of heat into electricity with breakthrough efficiency and power.

MTPV’s previous awards include "Best Venture" from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory Industry Growth Forum, the Platinum award and top honors from the WBT Innovation Technology Forum, and a National Innovation award from the National Innovation Summit & Showcase and National SBIR conference.

MTPV has also been named a finalist by the Department of Energy’s ARPA-e division and was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation.

"We are happy to see MTPV’s continued recognition for its outstanding technology," said Annie Theriault, Vice President at Northwater Capital one of MTPV’s investors. "We are excited about the promise of MTPV’s award-winning, patented technology and its ability to provide a significant return on our investment."

SEMICON West is the flagship annual event for the global microelectronics industry. It is the premier event for the display of new products and technologies for microelectronics design and manufacturing, featuring technologies from across the microelectronics supply chain – from electronic design automation, to device fabrication (wafer processing), to final manufacturing (assembly, packaging, and test).

Infinite Graphics (IGI), a supplier of service and software products for the Medium Area Mask (MAM) market, has added new capability in the form of new and upgraded equipment. IGI added a Heidelberg Volume Pattern Generator (VPG), a large area lithography system.  The technology offers substrates up to 800 x 800mm, structures down to 0.8µm and an address grid down to 20nm.  The company also upgraded two direct write laser imaging systems bringing the total to four imaging systems in Minneapolis and two in Singapore.

“To offer quicker turn with smaller features, smaller defects and cleaner masks, we also purchased two additional Automatic Optical Inspection (AOI) systems giving us a total of five inspection systems in Minneapolis and another semiconductor quality MAM cleaner,” said Clifford Stritch, Infinite Graphics Incorporated’s CEO.  “These new systems will find sub-micron defects on masks to 14” and one micron defects on larger masks to 24” x 32”.  The AOI can inspect to CAD data, compare die to die or inspect to design rules.”

Design and manufacturing solutions provided by IGI include precision imaging on film, glass and custom flat or curved substrates, 3D microstructures, industry renowned data clean-up, phototooling software and custom turnkey systems.  IGI targets electronics, biological and MOEMs markets.

M/A-COM Technology Solutions Holdings, Inc., a supplier of high performance RF, microwave, and millimeter wave products, today announced it has filed suit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against GigOptix, Inc. (NYSE MKT:GIG) for patent infringement.

The complaint alleges that GigOptix makes, uses, imports, offers to sell, and/or sells in the United States electro-optics polymers containing chromophores that infringe two MACOM patents, including certain GigOptix Mach-Zehnder modulator products that GigOptix markets or promotes as containing "Thin Film Polymer on Silicon (‘TFPS(TM)’)" technology. MACOM is seeking injunctive relief barring the infringement, as well as monetary damages, including treble damages based on allegedly willful infringement by GigOptix, attorney’s fees and costs of suit.

"MACOM has built a substantial patent portfolio through investment in innovation, and will defend that investment vigorously when required," said Ray Moroney, Optoelectronics Product Line Manager for MACOM. "We look forward to a just resolution of this matter through the legal process."

(Reuters) – SunEdison Inc said it would spin off its semiconductor business in an initial public offering and use the proceeds to build solar farms.

Shares of the company, formerly known as MEMC Electronic Materials, jumped 23 percent in morning trade on Thursday, their steepest rise in one year. SunEdison said it plans to sell a minority stake in the newly formed SunEdison Semiconductor to the public in the offering, which is scheduled for early 2014. A SunEdison spokeswoman declined to comment on what the IPO might raise, but re-iterated the company’s commitment to its solar business, which designs, installs and maintains solar power plants.

"We’ve been very clear that we see solar as a strong growth opportunity," said Dawn Brister.

"SunEdison is justified in narrowing its focus to the solar industry given the strong spurt in demand, particularly in terms of installed capacity," RBC Capital Markets analyst Mahesh Sanganeria said.

Several solar companies, such as SunPower Corp and First Solar Inc, have moved into the higher margin business of developing solar farms as solar panel prices continue to remain weak.

Global installations are expected grow at a double-digit rate to 35 gigawatt (GW) in 2013, according to business information provider IHS.

SunEdison ended the second quarter with a project pipeline of 2.9 GW, up 218 megawatt from the first quarter. The company, which changed its name from MEMC Electronic Materials in May, reports results under two units: semiconductor materials and solar energy.

The semiconductor materials business, which makes wafers used in chips for computers, mobile phones and cars, accounted for a third of second-quarter revenue of $401 million. SunEdison earlier this month reported a wider-than-expected quarterly loss and said its semiconductor business would remain weak due to a slump in the wafer market.

A bulk of the company’s revenue comes from its solar energy business, SunEdison expects to file a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the third quarter of 2013, the company said on Thursday.

(Reporting by Swetha Gopinath in Bangalore; Editing by Kirti Pandey and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty

One of the most promising types of solar cells has a few drawbacks. A scientist at Michigan Technological University may have overcome one of them.

Dye-sensitized solar cells are thin, flexible, easy to make and very good at turning sunshine into electricity. However, a key ingredient is one of the most expensive metals on the planet: platinum. While only small amounts are needed, at $1,500 an ounce, the cost of the silvery metal is still significant.

Yun Hang Hu, the Charles and Carroll McArthur Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, has developed a new, inexpensive material that could replace the platinum in solar cells without degrading their efficiency: 3D graphene.

Read more: Graphene nanoscrolls are formed by decoration of magnetic nanoparticles

Regular graphene is a famously two-dimensional form of carbon just a molecule or so thick. Hu and his team invented a novel approach to synthesize a unique 3D version with a honeycomb-like structure. To do so, they combined lithium oxide with carbon monoxide in a chemical reaction that forms lithium carbonate (Li2CO3) and the honeycomb graphene. The Li2CO3 helps shape the graphene sheets and isolates them from each other, preventing the formation of garden-variety graphite.  Furthermore, the Li2CO3 particles can be easily removed from 3D honeycomb-structured graphene by an acid.

The researchers determined that the 3D honeycomb graphene had excellent conductivity and high catalytic activity, raising the possibility that it could be used for energy storage and conversion. So they replaced the platinum counter electrode in a dye-sensitized solar cell with one made of the 3D honeycomb graphene. Then they put the solar cell in the sunshine and measured its output.

The cell with the 3D graphene counter electrode converted 7.8 percent of the sun’s energy into electricity, nearly as much as the conventional solar cell using costly platinum (8 percent).

Synthesizing the 3D honeycomb graphene is neither expensive nor difficult, said Hu, and making it into a counter electrode posed no special challenges.

The research has been funded by the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund (PRF-51799-ND10) and the National Science Foundation (NSF-CBET-0931587). The article describing the work, “3D Honeycomb-Like Structured Graphene and Its High Efficiency as a Counter-Electrode Catalyst for Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells,” coauthored by Hu, Michigan Tech graduate student Hui Wang, Franklin Tao of the University of Notre Dame, Dario J. Stacchiola of Brookhaven National Laboratory and Kai Sun of the University of Michigan, was published online July 29 in the journal Angewandte Chemie, International Edition.

Printed electronics refers to a process in which printing technology is used to produce various kinds of electronics goods, such as electronic circuits, sensors and devices. Printed electronics is emerging as a technology that will replace traditional photolithography, which requires costly materials, complex processes and expensive equipment, for the production of simple circuits or electronics components. In addition, printing technology allows patterning a desired substance on a specific location without complex processes. 

According to the “Emerging Displays Report – Printed Electronics Technology – 2013” report, published by IHS, the applied market for printed electronics is forecast to gradually grow after 2015. The total applied market created by printed electronics technology is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 47 percent to $24.3 billion by 2020 from $3.3 billion in 2013.

The global printed electronics market is expected to grow in sync with the opening of the flexible display market. Currently, the technology is commercially applied to touch panel sensors and FPCBs, which have relatively low entry barriers. With partial application to RFIDs, smart tags, LCDs and OLEDs, the technology will gradually expand its application to the fabrication of flexible displays and thin film photovoltaics.

Whereas the current display industry has developed its technology and products centered on scaling-up to large sizes and realizing high-resolution images, the future industry development direction is expected to focus on flexible displays. Compared to the conventional glass substrate, flexible displays are thinner, lighter, and less prone to break. With such properties, it is expected that flexible electronic devices will be able to replace the existing market as well as create new ones.

The flexible (thin glass, metal thin film, plastic) substrate is gaining importance as a key component that determines the processability, performance, reliability, and price of flexible displays. To this end, IHS Electronics & Media publishes a Flexible Display Substrate Technology report to analyze the technology development, industrial conditions, and R&D trends of flexible substrates.

According to the report, the flexible substrate market is forecast to grow to $506.7 million by 2020 from a $2.5 million in 2013. The OLED display, another market that can be created by applying the flexible substrate technology, is expected to make up 91 percent of the overall market.

The ability to control nanoscale imperfections in superconducting wires results in materials with unparalleled and customized performance, according to a new study from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Applications for superconducting wires, which carry electricity without resistance when cooled to a critical temperature, include underground transmission cables, transformers and large-scale motors and generators. But these applications require wires to operate under different temperature and magnetic field regimes. 

This figure shows the critical current, Ic, and engineering critical current density, JE, in a superconducting wire as a function of applied magnetic field orientation at 65 Kelvin and 3 Tesla. The top curve shows results from a newly published ORNL study. The other two curves are from previously reported record values. A minimum JE of 43.7 kiloamperes/cm2 (assuming a 50 micron thick stabilizer layer) and a minimum Ic of 455 Amperes/cm was obtained for all applied field orientations. This is the highest reported performance for a superconductor wire or a film on a technical substrate.

A team led by ORNL’s Amit Goyal demonstrated that superconducting wires can be tuned to match different operating conditions by introducing small amounts of non-superconducting material that influences how the overall material behaves. Manipulating these nanoscale columns — also known as defects — allows researchers to exert control over the forces that regulate the wires’ superconducting performance. The team’s findings are published in Nature Publishing Group’s Scientific Reports.

“Not only can we introduce these nanocolumn defects within the superconductor and get enhanced performance, but we can optimize the performance for different application regimes by modifying the defect spacing and density,” Goyal said.

A wire sample grown with this process exhibited unprecedented performance in terms of engineering critical current density, which measures the amount of current the wire can carry per unit cross-sectional area. This metric more accurately reflects the real-world capabilities of the material because it takes into account the wire’s non-superconducting components such as the substrate and the buffer and stabilizer layers, Goyal said.

“We report a record performance at 65 Kelvin and 3 Tesla, where most rotating machinery applications like motors and generators are slated to operate,” he said.

The paper reports a minimum engineering critical current density at all applied magnetic field orientations of 43.7 kiloamperes/cm2, which is more than twice the performance level needed for most applications. This metric assumes the presence of a 50-micron-thick copper stabilizer layer required in applications.

Generating defects in the superconductor is accomplished through an ORNL-developed self-assembly process, which enables researchers to design a material that automatically develops the desired nanoscale microstructure during growth.

The mechanism behind this process, which adds very little to the production cost, was the subject of a recently published study by a team led by Goyal in Advanced Functional Materials.

“When you’re making the wires, you can dial-in the properties because the defects self-assemble,” Goyal said. “You change the composition of the superconductor when you’re depositing the tape.”

Goyal, who has collaborated with multiple superconducting technology companies, hopes the private sector will incorporate the team’s findings to improve upon existing products and generate new applications.

The study is published as “Engineering nanocolumnar defect configurations for optimized vortex pinning in high temperature superconducting nanocomposite wires.” Co-authors are ORNL’s Sung Hun Wee and Claudia Cantoni and the University of Tennessee’s Yuri Zuev.

The research was sponsored by DOE’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability. The research was supported by ORNL’s Shared Research Equipment (ShaRE) User Program, which is sponsored by DOE’s Office of Science.

 

New research shows that a class of materials being eyed for the next generation of computers behaves asymmetrically at the sub-atomic level. This research is a key step toward understanding the topological insulators that may have the potential to be the building blocks of a super-fast quantum computer that could run on almost no electricity.

Scientists from the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory contributed first-principles calculations and co-authored the paper “Mapping the Orbital Wavefunction of the Surface States in 3-D Topological Insulators,” which appears in the current issue of Nature Physics. A topological insulator is a material that behaves as an insulator in its interior but whose surface contains conducting states.

In the paper, researchers explain how the materials act differently above and below the Dirac point and how the orbital and spin texture of topological insulator states switched exactly at the Dirac point. The Dirac point refers to the place where two conical forms – one representing energy, the other momentum – come together at a point. In the case of topological insulators, the orbital and spin textures of the sub-atomic particles switch precisely at the Dirac point. The phenomenon occurs because of the relationship between electrons and their holes in a semiconductor.

This research is a key step toward understanding the topological insulators like bismuth selenide (Bi2Se3), bismuth telluride (Bi2Te3), antimony telluride (Sb2Te3), and mercury telluride (HgTe) that may have the potential to be the building blocks of a quantum computer, a machine with the potential of loading the information from a data center into the space of a laptop and processing data much faster than today’s best supercomputers.

“The energy efficiency should be much better,” said NREL Scientist Jun-Wei Luo, one of the co-authors. Instead of being confined to the on-and-off switches of the binary code, a quantum computer will act more like the human brain, seeing something but imagining much more, he said. “This is entirely different technology.”

Topological Insulators are of great interest currently for their potential to use their exotic properties to transmit information on electron spins with virtually no expenditure of electricity, said Luo. NREL’s Xiuwen Zhang is another co-author as are scientists from University of Colorado, Rutgers University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Colorado School of Mines. Luo and Zhang work in NREL’s Center for Inverse Design, one of 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers established around the nation by the Energy Department’s Office of Science in 2009 to accelerate basic research on energy.

The finding of orbital texture switch at Dirac point implies the novel backwards spin texture — right-handed instead of left-handed, in the short-hand of physicists — comes from the coupling of spin texture to the orbital texture for the conserved quantity is total angular momentum of the wave function, not spin. The new findings, supported partly by observations taken at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, were surprising and bolster the potential of the topological insulators.

“In this paper, we computed and measured the profile of the topological states and found that the orbital texture of topological states switches from tangential to radial across the Dirac point,” Zhang said. Equally surprising, they found that phenomenon wasn’t a function of a unique material, but was common to all topological insulators.

The topological insulators probably won’t be practical for solar cells, because at the surface they contain no band gap. A band gap – the gap between when a material is in a conducting state and an inert state – is essential for solar cells to free photons and have them turn into energy carrying electrons.

But the topological insulators could be very useful for other kinds of electronics-spintronics. The electrons of topological insulators will self-polarize at opposite device edges. “We usually drive the electron in a particular direction to spatially separate the spin-up and spin-down electrons, but this exotic property suggests that electrons as a group don’t have to move,” Luo said. “The initial idea is we don’t need any current to polarize the electron spins. We may be able to develop a spin quantum computer and spin quantum computations.”

In theory, an entire data center could operate with virtually no electricity. “That’s probably more in theory than reality,” Luo said, noting that other components of the center likely would still need electricity. “But it would be far more energy efficient.” And the steep drop in electricity would also mean a steep drop in the number of coolers and fans needed to cool things down.

Luo cautioned that this is still basic science. The findings may have limited application to renewable energy, but Luo noted that another of NREL’s key missions is energy efficiency.

NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy’s primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for the Energy Department by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.

Read more semiconductor news

Researchers at Umeå University, together with researchers at Uppsala University and Stockholm University, show in a new study how nitrogen-doped graphene can be rolled into perfect Archimedean nano scrolls by adhering magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles on the surface of the graphene sheets. The new material may have very good properties for application as electrodes in for example Li-ion batteries.

Read more: Graphene sees explosive demand in a variety of industries

Graphene is one of the most interesting materials for future applications in everything from high performance electronics, optical components to flexible and strong materials. Ordinary graphene consists of carbon sheets that are single or few atomic layers thick.

graphene nanoscrolls

In the study the researchers have modified the graphene by replacing some of the carbon atoms by nitrogen atoms. By this method they obtain anchoring sites for the iron oxide nanoparticles that are decorated onto the graphene sheets in a solution process. In the decoration process one can control the type of iron oxide nanoparticles that are formed on the graphene surface, so that they either form so called hematite (the reddish form of iron oxide that often is found in nature) or maghemite, a less stable and more magnetic form of iron oxide.

“Interestingly we observed that when the graphene is decorated by maghemite, the graphene sheets spontaneously start to roll into perfect Archimedean nano scrolls, while when decorated by the less magnetic hematite nanoparticles the graphene remain as open sheets, says Thomas Wågberg, Senior lecturer at the Department of Physics at Umeå University.

The nanoscrolls can be visualized as traditional “Swiss rolls” where the sponge-cake represents the graphene, and the creamy filling is the iron oxide nanoparticles. The graphene nanoscrolls are however around one million times thinner.

The results that now have been published in Nature Communications are conceptually interesting for several reasons. It shows that the magnetic interaction between the iron oxide nanoparticles is one of the main effects behind the scroll formation. It also shows that the nitrogen defects in the graphene lattice are necessary for both stabilizing a sufficiently high number of maghemite nanoparticles, and also responsible for “buckling” the graphene sheets and thereby lowering the formation energy of the nanoscrolls.

The process is extraordinary efficient. Almost 100 percent of the graphene sheets are scrolled. After the decoration with maghemite particles the research team could not find any open graphene sheets.

Moreover, they showed that by removing the iron oxide nanoparticles by acid treatment the nanoscrolls again open up and go back to single graphene sheets

“Besides adding valuable fundamental understanding in the physics and chemistry of graphene, nitrogen-doping and nanoparticles we have reasons to believe that the iron oxide decorated nitrogen doped graphene nanoscrolls have very good properties for application as electrodes in for example Li-ion batteries, one of the most important batteries in daily life electronics, “ says Thomas Wågberg.

The study has been conducted within the “The artificial leaf” project which is funded by Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation to physicist, chemists, and plant science researchers at Umeå University.