Solar and Semiconductors Come Together In San Francisco - 0 views
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xxx xxx on 23 Jul 08The solar industry and semiconductor industry are intimately connected. Both industries rely on silicon and both use much of the same processing technology and supply chain to produce their products. Nowhere has this connection been on better display than last week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco California, where the Intersolar North America made its debut in conjunction with SEMICON West 2008. The show provided an opportunity for those in the two industries to connect and allowed those companies that work in both spaces to showcase their collective efforts. According to Chris O'Brien, Head of Market Development and Government Relations for North America for Oerlikon Solar, holding the two conferences together gave companies greater exposure and showed the promise of the U.S. solar market. In recent months a number of traditional semiconductor companies including Intel and National Semiconductor have made announcements that they are making plans to enter the solar industry in one way or another. Intel spun off it's solar research area into a new solar company called SpectraWatt. National Semiconductor announced that it will be introducing it's first solar product, SolarMagic, that could raise the efficiency of residential and industrial solar systems. Kevin Kayser, Senior Marketing Manager at National said that he product will be targeted at installers and integrators and much planning went into the company's decision to enter the solar space. "Photovoltaics currently has less than 1% of the energy market, but we think it has potentially one of the fastest growth rates of any alternative energy source. Now certainly we're looking at wind, we're looking geothermal, we're looking at other sources, but from an electronics point of view we saw that we had the most immediate potential impact in solar photovoltaics," Kayser said.