news digest ♦ Solar
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BlackBox Introduces ‘Electronic Glue’ Technology For Solar Cells
This will be BlackBox’s first commercial application of this high efficiency low cost technology for ‘printed’ solar cells.
Shrink Nanotechnologies, (“Shrink”), an innovative company which develops products and licensing opportunities in the solar energy industry, has, through its wholly owned subsidiary, BlackBox Semiconductor, recently licensed “electronic glue” chemistry.
This will enable high efficiency solar cells to be fabricated from semiconductor nanocrystals with low cost roll-to-roll processing.
enable a next generation of highly efficient and low cost solar cells. However, to date, efficiencies of such devices have been extremely low - mostly due to the fact that the “electronic coupling” between nanocrystals has been poor. This means that when energy is created, it does not flow very well - certainly not as well as silicon - which means that minimal amounts of the energy collected are ultimately harvested and turned into power. “Electronic glue” solves this critical technical barrier.
In a solar cell, light is harvested by the semiconductor material (typically silicon) which produces charges. In order to produce electricity, these charges need to flow easily through the material. Solar cells have been made from nanomaterials, but the efficiency improving properties of the nanomaterials have to be eliminated by melting them together because this is the only way for charge carriers to flow. Nanocrystals have been great light harvesters but have historically have provided a poor path for charges to flow.
The University of Chicago technology, invented by Dmitri Talapin, solves this problem by modifying the nanocrystals with an “electronic glue” that allows charges to flow more easily between particles, thus giving the device the potential power and efficiency of bulk semiconductors while enjoying the benefits of the small size and flexibility of the semiconductor nanocrystals. This will lead to a device being manufactured with the ultimate combination of high efficiency and low cost, roll-to-roll production.
“Shrink has done a considerable amount of work in the semiconductor nanocrystal realm, always running into the headwinds electronic coupling issues. We believe that Dr. Talapin’s ‘electronic glue’ technology is going to be a game changer as we ready our resources to turn this technology into products that make a difference in people’s lives,” said Shrink CEO Mark L. Baum.
The Large and Growing Solar Market Needs a Game Changing Next Generation Commercial Technology
For years it has been theorized that the tunable properties of semiconductor nanocrystals could
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www.compoundsemiconductor.net January / February 2011
The global solar market is poised to rebound in the coming years and ultimately eclipse the $83 billion market in 2014, according to U.S. Solar Energy Market World Data, 2nd Edition by leading industrial market research firm SBI Energy.
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