Solar Industry Standards: Can’t We All Just Get Along?

To bring next-generation pv to market in a way that’s standardized both for manufacturers and end-users, SEMI, a semiconductor manufacturers industry organization has partnered with the U.S. Photovoltaic Manufacturing Consortium (PVMC), a DOE SunShot Initiative program focussed on reducing the costs PV. The two organizations announced Jan. 29 a memorandum of understanding to more directly [...]

SEMI: Solar Equipment Supplier Slump to Continue

For the third straight quarter the sales of new manufacturing equipment for solar photovoltaic has slipped, showing there’s less new PV manufacturing coming online, according to a new report from SEMI, a semiconductor industry trade group. While it doesn’t necessarily mean manufacturers are cutting back their production, it does show that the growth of the [...]

Memories of 300mm Semiconductor Fabs

I ran across an old issue of Future Fab International – Issue 6 – that I have had since it was published in 1998. I helped write an article that was published in this issue titled “Complete System Integration is Crucial to the Success of 300mm Manufacturing.” The article looked at changes that would be [...]

Solar Manufacturing: Huge Driver for India’s Semi Industry

The history of the semiconductor industry in India dates back to the1980s, when multinational giants from the U.S. started outsourcing chipdesign and software development to India, so that the country’stechnical talent pool could be tapped. Initially work in this area wascentered on software development directly tied to hardware. It includeddevelopment of automation tools, modeling and [...]

Who Says Moore’s Law Doesn’t Apply to Solar? Not Varian Semi

Varian Semiconductor, headquartered in Gloucester, Massachusetts, believes it can bring a Moore’s Law-like momentum to solar. Moore’s Law is the observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1966 thatthe number of transistors that can be placed on a chip can be doubled every 24 months. But Moore’s Law doesn’t really map to solar. Moore’s [...]

National Semi,Suntech Team Up to Optimize Panels

Suntech Power Holdings and National Semiconductor will collaborate todevelop a smart solar panel that includes the SolarMagic chipset fromNational. The collaboration between Silicon Valley’s founding industry (chips)and one of its newest (solar) grows closer by the day. The SolarMagicchipset essentially boosts performance by correcting for problemscreated by debris, shading, orientation and other issues. With chipsetslike [...]

CHAD Industries announces semi-automatic solar simulator

CHAD Industries Inc., a leading supplier of factory automation solutions for the electronics, semiconductor, and solar manufacturing industries, in conjunction with Alpha Omega Power Technologies, is introducing aline of automated solar simulators. These units are intended for low to high volume production of concentrated photovoltaic (CPV)products. The systems will be presented at the Solar Power [...]

SEMI announces eight new technical standards

SEMI has published eight new technical standards applicable to thesemiconductor, MEMS, FPD and photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing industry. The new standards, developed by technical experts from equipment andmaterials suppliers, device manufacturers and other companiesparticipating in the SEMI International Standards Program, are available through the SEMIViews Standards product, available at:www.semi.org/semiviews. The new standards, part of the July [...]

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