news  review


Mumbai to rely on Reliance Power and First Solar CdTe project


FIRST SOLAR has announced the commissioning of a 40 MW (AC) ground- mounted solar photovoltaic power plant in the state of Rajasthan, India that will provide clean energy to Mumbai. The recently completed project was built in just five months.


Comprising some 500,000 First Solar thin- film modules, the power plant near the village of Dhursar in Jaisalmer district of Rajasthan in North Western India, is expected to generate more than 60 million kilowatt hours (kwh) of clean solar energy a year. This will make it one of the country’s largest photovoltaic power plant in terms of electricity generation. Covering 350 acres, it is 23 times the size of Calcutta’s famous Eden Gardens cricket grounds and is expected to satisfy the annual electricity needs of more than 70,000 average Indian households. It will displace nearly 60,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year, the equivalent of taking more than 25,000 cars off the road.


“We are proud to partner with Reliance on this milestone project,” says Mike Ahearn, First Solar Chairman and Interim Chief


DARPA funds efforts to


combine InP


with silicon ICs HIGH-PERFORMANCE microsystems are vital for a wide variety of Department of Defence (DoD) systems that provide US war fighters in communications, sensing and electronic warfare. Current fabrication technology limits the types of materials and devices that can be integrated together, forcing circuit designers to make compromises when selecting devices for an integrated microsystem.


Executive Officer. “We applaud India on its visionary solar policies and Reliance Power for their leadership in implementing them, and we look forward to helping India realise its solar vision through this and future projects.”


“This power plant demonstrates the huge potential of solar energy to help India meet its growing energy needs in the most environmentally friendly manner. It is also a testimony of the quick timeframe in which solar power plants can be built and commissioned,” adds Anil D Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Power. The Dhursar project is the first that Reliance plans to build with First Solar modules as part of a 100 MW module order placed last year.


Kopin makes massive moves in


GaN HEMT technology KOPIN has announced that it has obtained record results from GaN-based high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) materials. The advanced GaN-based materials developed at Kopin are important for improving performance of next-generation power amplifiers and power switching converters.


The research, which has recently been published in Applied Physics Letters, describes the use of InGaN as the conducting layer in HEMT structures grown on sapphire and SiC substrates. The use of an InGaN channel layer, instead of GaN has the benefit of providing a back-channel barrier for better electron confinement, which is important for deep sub-micron gate length devices to achieve


ultra-high-frequency operation. However, obtaining good InGaN channel HEMT materials is challenging since InGaN layers can become very rough during growth.


Using proprietary MOCVD growth processes, Kopin scientists showed a high electron mobility of 1290 cm2/V.s and a low sheet resistance of 240 Ω square. Kopin says this is about 30 % lower than the previous best result.


Further details of this work have been published in the paper, “ InGaN channel high electron mobility transistor structures grown by metal organic chemical vapor deposition”, by O. Laboutin et al, Applied Physics Letters, 100, 121909 (2012), published online on 23 March 2012.


12 www.compoundsemiconductor.net April / May 2012


DARPA’s Diverse Accessible Heterogeneous Integration (DAHI) program is launching the DAHI Foundry Technology effort to advance novel methods for combining a variety of devices and materials onto a single silicon chip.


Thomas Lee, office director at DARPA Microsystems Technology Office says, “Enabling the ability to ‘mix and match’ a wide variety of devices and materials on a common silicon substrate would allow circuit designers to select the best device for each function within their designs. This integration would provide DoD systems with the benefits of a variety of devices and materials integrated in close proximity on a single chip, minimising the performance limitations caused by physical separation among devices.”


This effort also seeks to enable complex signal-processing and self- correction architectures to be brought to bear. The DAHI Foundry Technology project hopes to establish a foundry capability for the production of chips using a wide range of heterogeneously integrated devices.


“DARPA anticipates bringing the compound semiconductor and silicon integrated circuit (IC) communities together for new ways to integrate components onto a single silicon wafer,” adds Sanjay Raman, DARPA program manager. “Such convergence would enable foundry-style production of high-performance microsystems, leveraging today’s silicon IC manufacturing base.”


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