Originally published January 20 2006
Nano silicon crystals could replace lights and traditional solar panels
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Nano silicon crystals, utilizing the photoelectric effect (that light can produce electricity and electricity can produce light), could revolutionize not only the way we create light, but also the way we currently harvest light in solar panels.
Einstein explained it a century ago and won a Nobel Prize.
It's called the photoelectric effect: light can produce electricity.
The company's process for reducing silicon to nanosize, light-sensitive crystal dots could revolutionize solar energy and lighting.
The start-up, which just moved to Santa Clara from St. Paul, Minn., claims it will be the first to market with a silicon nanoparticle solvent--silicon "ink"--that would mean lower-cost printing of silicon nanoparticles on polymer sheets.
That, in turn, would mean lower-cost solar energy because nanosize silicon is a more efficient converter of solar energy to electricity than previously used materials.
"It's brand-new technology," says InnovaLight CEO Conrad Burke, 39.
Any lighting technology on a silicon platform could "drive volume economics and mass market," says Mario Paniccia, director of Intel Corp.'s photonics technology lab.
Researchers in business and academia are scrambling to create such flexible solar cells because existing solid silicon solar panels are heavy and unwieldy.
The firm already tunes its fluid-stored silicon nanoparticle mix to capture everything from infrared to ultraviolet and the visible spectrum in between.
Conversely, it can infuse the fluid into thin, flexible panels that emit a controlled range of light--2-nanometer particles for blue, 10 nanometers for orange.
InnovaLight CEO Burke, whose roots are in sales, marketing and physics, was a fast riser at AT&T and its Lucent spin-off.
In 2000 he joined an optics firm called OMM Inc. that tanked with the telecom sector in 2003.
Stints with a venture-capital firm and optical- component maker Bookham Inc. followed.
Burke's former boss Phil Chapman, now CFO with Peregrine Semiconductor Corp. in San Diego, calls him "fearless."
Don't think about longer-lasting lightbulbs; think about the price of oil coming down $20 a barrel.
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