Silicon Valley chip equipment maker Applied Materials, which last
year moved into the solar cell business, is participating in a $27.1
million round of financing for Solaicx, an erstwhile competitor with an
innovative process for making the silicon wafers used in photovoltaic
cells. Applied’s venture arm (AMAT) also invested in the Santa Clara
startup in an earlier round. The current round is being led by D.E.
Shaw with Mitsui Ventures, Firsthand Capital Management, Big Sky
Ventures, and Greenhouse Capital Partners also participating. Business
2.0 magazine, where Green Wombat is an editor, featured Solaicx in a
November story about the Silicon Valley solar boom by B2 senior writers Tom McNichol and Michael V. Copeland:
There’s a missile-bunker vibe you get when walking into Solaicx,
a Silicon Valley startup that manufactures the silicon wafers that are
the building blocks of solar panels.
In one half of the
nondescript Santa Clara warehouse, three men sit hunched on a wood
platform 8 feet above the cement floor, their eyes locked on two
monitors. The screens show data and video gathered from a 24-foot-tall
steel tower. The tower begins in a squat, gourd-shaped base and tapers
to a cannon-size column with a long drum spinning slowly on top. Thick
power cables snake down its sides. Another sci-fi-looking tower rises
up off to one side of the building.
Inside the tower that has
everyone’s attention, molten silicon is being added to a thin,
8-inch-long rod, or "seed," of silicon. After 15 hours of precise
spinning and pulling, the seed will grow to a mirror-finished ingot
about 4 feet long and weighing more than 150 pounds. If it’s perfect –
and that is the point of Solaicx’s cutting-edge technology – it will
form a single crystal matrix, which is then trimmed and sliced into
1,000 wafers that sell for $5 apiece and are used by companies like
General Electric to build the most efficient solar modules on the
market today.
Bob Ford, Solaicx’s CEO, bounds down from the
platform and brushes a hand along an already cool ingot waiting to be
cut into wafers. His finger stops on a thin seam running laser-straight
down the side of the overgrown crystal. "That’s what you want to see,"
Ford says. "It means every atom is aligned. I’ve had guys literally
knock on our front door asking if we can supply them with $5 million
worth of these wafers a month. We can sell as much as we can make."
In
fact, before Solaicx even flipped the switch on its first silicon
crystal grower, GE promised to buy every wafer the four-year-old
company can crank out.
Green Wombat 
Your description of how Solaicx makes single-crystal silicon ingots could also describe the standard method used to produce wafers for semiconductor fabrication.
I assume that Solaicx has innovated this decades old process to reduce cost per wafer. Could you fill us in on their innovations and perhaps also discuss the cost reduction that they may achieve.
Thanks
Perhaps this article from Business Week quoted at http://www.konarkatech.com/news_and_events/konarka_articles/2004/9_september/business_week/another_dawn_for.php
Gives a hint of what is expected.
Though it is from 2004.
“Solaicx uses two tricks to produce better solar cells: make the silicon wafers 40% thinner and thus cheaper, and increase something called carrier lifetime. When photons from the sun hit the surface of a solar cell, they dislodge electrons from silicon atoms. The longer these electrons remain free — the carrier lifetime, measured in milliseconds — the greater the chance that they will stream off the solar cell “and into your toaster or lightbulb,” says J. William Yerkes, chief technology officer of Solaicx and a photovoltaics pioneer for three decades.”