It uses a non-silicon material called cadmium telluride to make ultra thin solar panels while the vast majority of its competitors use silicon.
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"And based on the whole phenomenon of polluted white dwarfs and what we've learnt in the last few years, we know that there's a disc of material that must be feeding the star's atmosphere with this silicon-rich material, " he told BBC News.
Take Sharp, which since 2000 has led the world in solar panels sold (it dropped to No. 2 last year in the midst of a silicon raw-material shortage).
If Dr Lipton is correct, the race has now begun to see whether the first artificial scientist to win a Nobel prize is based on silicon or biological material.
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The computer maker on Wednesday is discussing its advances in making optical-communications components from silicon, the mainstay material used in conventional computer chips.
Silicon has been the material of choice for power conversion devices.
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Solar cells, which convert light to electricity, have long relied on silicon, the same material upon which companies such as IBM and Intel build computer chips.
Purified silicon, the basic material of such cells, is expensive.
Silicon, the major raw material used in the manufacture of solar panels, requires an energy-intensive process to turn it into solar-grade silicon.
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In 1931 American chemical engineer Samuel Kistler invented the lightest known solid--an aerogel--by drying a form of silicon dioxide (a raw material for glass) under intense pressure and high temperature.
Light particles blast the photosensitive material on a silicon wafer to create the features on a chip, just as in photography, photons transform silver molecules on photographic film into visible images.
No one has been able to produce a ferrous material that can act like a silicon microprocessor at room temperature.
Silicon, however, is not the best material for sensing light.
The slim devices are arranged in rows across a support structure made of silicon carbide, a very light and very stiff material that will not bend or warp when it experiences the temperature extremes of space.
They assumed a continuing high price for silicon and thus their technology concentrated on making that expensive material more productive.
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The 36-year-old professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the intellectual ringleader of a cadre of "synthetic biologists" who are building useful devices out of genetic material, much as bits of mortar or silicon are used to erect complex objects.
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The company founders were researching how small silicon compounds and calcium could bind to leaves and other organic material to produce fossils.
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Gallium-nitride is manmade and not found in nature, and historically, LEDs are made by growing a gallium-nitride layer on top of a base material, which is typically sapphire or, more recently, silicon carbide.
Thanks to the technology revolution, we know more about silicon, particularly when it comes to manufacturing products in high volume, than any other material in the world.
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In a process the researchers describe in articles published today in Science and Advanced Materials, they used a silicon needle with a tip about ten thousand times smaller than an ant to sculpt a polymer material known as polyphthalaldehyde.
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One of the reasons the Nobel physics committee, and now much of the world, is fascinated by the material known as graphene is on account of its possible role as the successor to silicon in new generations of electronic devices.
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The material is an organic photovoltaic semiconductor (called rr-P3HT) which, unlike the metal or silicon-based materials used until now for such biotechnological interfaces, is soft, light, flexible and highly biocompatible and naturally sensitive to visible light.
They did this by putting pieces of silicon or one of a number of other solid materials inside a shoe-box-sized cavity and zapping the material with microwaves from a metal tip.
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