| I agree that this is going to be a commercial failure even if funded. Additional stray observations: - The "magic," if anything, is supposed to be that super-thin kerfless wafers could justify the industrial scale use of float zone silicon. FZ has often been the material of choice for lab scale fabrication of champion devices. Unlike ordinary boron doped p-type Cz silicon, it doesn't have dissolved oxygen traces from crucible walls, so it doesn't suffer B-O complex light induced degradation. - High efficiency is still worth a premium, even if low-mid range quality cells are stuck in a brutal commoditized competition. (But high efficiency is not worth a large premium, hence the problems of even well-established high efficiency manufacturers like SunPower and Panasonic.) - Super thin wafers are less sensitive to bulk recombination. Though this theoretical advantage is unneeded if you're starting with superpure FZ silicon in the first place. - FZ silicon is only available in smaller diameters, so the cells wouldn't be drop-in replacements in the usual 60/72 cell module that starts with 156 mm cells. - Silicon's resistance to damage by cosmic rays goes up dramatically as the cell thickness drops down to the few-tens-of-microns range. But that's not relevant for terrestrial use and compound semiconductors are still more efficient and more damage-resistant for space use. Other companies that proposed to do kerfless wafering with ion implantation and failed to reach commercial success: Twin Creeks Technologies GT Advanced Technologies (later owners of Twin Creeks assets) SiGen 1366 Technologies appears to have the closest-to-industrial kerfless process at present, though it's not as dramatic as as some kerfless technology concepts. I hope that their partnership with Hanwha Q Cells goes to full scale production before the money runs out. |