Comments on: IBM muscles into CIGS solar-cell market

Big Blue and Japanese semiconductor equipment manufacturer Tokyo Ohka Kogyo plan to develop technology that can hit $1 per watt in two or three years.

[Marcus Westrup]

What I want to see, is technology that doesn't rely on rare materials like indium and gallium. The world supply of these metals is so limited, large scale production of solar cells, LED's, super conductors etc. will not be possible, and thus won't make a real difference to the green economy.

[Barry_]

There is a new solar technology that uses quantum dots which are not made from rare or toxic materials...soon to be on the market

[Remo_Williams]

Correct, reliance on iridium would be a mistake. I'd rather see more work in tech that effectively traps the light in nanotubes. The move should be to 35-50% efficiency of conversion so the process can become cost-effective at scale without rare metals.

-R

[mlamonica]

Cadmium (which I believe is mined with zinc) can also be a human toxin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium#Toxicity

[mlamonica]

I should make clear: CIGS does not use cadmium but it is used in other thin-film solar cells (ie Cadmium telluride)

[OneOfTheToolsInTheShed]

IBM doesn't have all that much to contribute here, frankly. I'm not dissing Big Blue in any way but while they undoubtedly know a lot about what a good multi-phase IAJ CIGS layer looks like on the charac. tools, there are solar-specialized companies out there with hundreds of man-years of deposition experience.

The problem is really NOT to make small-scale NREL-busting champion devices, but in scaling-up something that can do >15-16% to a >1m² substrate.

And just to correct Martin, the best CIGS cells DO use Cadmium, but only in very small quantities, for the CdS 'buffer' layer. You can avoid it if your really want to, but it generally is used.

[iosono5466]

Thank you