Technology
Light capture and red spectrum sensitization
As thin film solar businesses have leveraged more and more of the glass and deposition technologies developed by the flat panel display industry, the need to engineer more functionality on the glass has become clear. This has included the use of nanomaterial coatings to enhance the amount of light captured and improve the sensitivity of the underlying PV cell. QD Soleil is able to leverage a broad set of underlying technologies. For example, Nanosys has developed a series of CMOS grade high temperature stable core/shell nanoparticles with metallic cores and dielectric shells. This material architecture is used by Nanosys in its emerging flash memory business. In addition, Nanosys has developed the ability, over large areas, to apply the materials at high density, in a very uniform manner, using a low temperature solution coating. Many man-years of chemistry development and IP protection have gone into the material synthesis and coating technology. This type of solution applied colloidal approach, with CMOS grade purity and high temperature stability is ideal and unmatched in creating cost effective red/infrared sensitized solar design utilizing plasmonic scattering. In addition, the shape of the nanoparticles, shell and coating technologies underpinning this approach is the world's leading way to achieve high density and uniformly optimized scattering films. The nanoparticles strongly scatter incoming light from normal incidence, to other directions and thereby increase it's absorption by the underlying PV cell, substantially enhancing the efficiency of the solar design. Compared to physically vapor deposition of metal film and annealing to create nano-dots (the competing approach), the QD Soleil approach is much more dense and uniform in nanoparticle size and many times more cost effective by eliminating the need for expensive vacuum tools. Finally, QD Soleil has other materials and deposition technologies uniquely well suited for light capture at the glass level, including many non vacuum deposition and patterning technologies.
