After more than 5 years and US$500 million dollars invested, Nanosolar has emerged from secrecy to quell rumors that the company’s technology was all smoke and nanomirrors. This long-shot technology risk is now claimed to produce mean cell efficiencies of 11%, with a champion cell from a Gen3 line measured by NREL at 16%. The […]

At the SEMICON West 2009 Device Scaling TechXPOT, moderated by this editor, SEMATECH’s Ray Jammy reviewed the latest results in scaling CMOS transistors. “We are litererally running out of atoms,” explained Jammy. “You can see the number of atoms in a gate dielectric.” When you have such thin layers, how do you control device parameters? […]