The fundamental nature of the Company’s technology is enabling for a wide range of commercial applications.
Essentially, any product or process that utilizes thin films of silicon dioxide or mixed silicon oxides will benefit from Natcore’s technology — and that list includes applications in semiconductors; MEMs (micro electromechanical systems); passive optical components for the all-optical internet (including fiber-to-the home telecommunications systems); architectural applications focusing on energy conservation through the controlled emissivity of architectural surfaces; all-optical interconnects for high-speed computer/server backplanes; ophthalmic lens coatings; and corrosion protection, among many others.
The Company expects that the potential applications for its revolutionary liquid phase deposition technology will continue to branch out as a result of further research and development. Intellectual property and licensing revenues will form a foundation of its business plan.
Natcore’s product development focus after silicon solar cell coatings and devices will be on products utilizing silicon substrates in one form or another. At this time, the primary potential opportunities are envisioned in the following areas:
Silicon Dioxide on Silicon: SOI (Silicon-On-Insulator) Wafers A wafer technology known as silicon-on-insulator, or SOI, represents the future of microprocessor design.
In SOI-based chip design, a transistor's silicon junction area is placed on top of an electrical insulator, typically silicon oxide. By thus eliminating the junction capacitance between the transistor and the silicon substrate itself, the transistor is able to operate much more quickly. Moreover, it can operate with as little as one-third the power requirements of a typical transistor on a standard silicon wafer.
SOI chip production is the fastest-growing area of silicon wafer manufacturing, because faster, lower-power transistors are essential to the multitude of handheld and/or wireless devices that are already becoming pervasive consumer products. In short, the next wave of the digital revolution will be built on the back of the SOI chip, and Natcore’s technology promises to help make SOI chips more affordable. The following illustration shows a schematic cross section of a typical SOI wafer. There are a variety of ways to produce the top, or device, layer, but all processes require a pre-oxidized layer ranging in thickness from a few tenths of a micron to a few microns. (1.0 micron = 1,000 nanometers.) The substrate is a standard silicon wafer several hundred times the thickness of the buried oxide layer. The finished SOI wafer can be processed using standard wafer-fab equipment.
Production of the crucial oxide layer can be accomplished using Natcore’s proprietary film-growth technology, with substantial capital and operating cost savings.
Potential customers for Natcore’s technology will come from two sources: 1) existing SOI wafer suppliers, all of whom have existing manufacturing facilities producing their current product, and 2) potential new SOI wafer suppliers who will enter as the market grows.
Although the present volume of the SOI wafer market does not represent an important source of revenues for Natcore, the application is straightforward, and worth the effort to position the Company to enter it as soon as practicable. Semiconductor device market analysis firms unanimously predict that SOI wafers will eventually supplant ordinary silicon wafers in the long term. Were that to occur, SOI wafers would eventually represent a potential hundred-million-dollar-per-year market for the Company.
Optical Components Businesses and individuals worldwide are demanding higher-speed communications and data-handling capability. The widely accepted solution for meeting such demand is the use of dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) in an all-optical Internet. The all-optical Internet infrastructure has three main segments: long-haul, fiber-optic trunk lines; citywide and local-area fiber-optic rings; and the well-known “last-mile” fiber-optic branches that connect to the users. While installations of the long-haul and citywide segments are underway in the U.S., Japan and Europe, the last-mile segment has not yet been adequately addressed.
A broad range of both active and passive DWDM optical components is needed to complete this segment of the infrastructure, and represents by far the largest market for such devices. (All three segments require the devices.)
Products are already under development by many companies to meet the ever-growing demand. But the key element does not yet exist: a high-volume manufacturing technology that can create components at low-enough cost to entice end-users to upgrade from the electronic Internet connections they now have.
The Company believes it has precisely that technology.
The highest-performing optical components are made from high-purity silicon dioxide, with controlled amounts of additives used to create the desired functionality in any particular class of device.
An arrayed waveguide is an excellent example: The usual process for making the device is deposition of a multi-layer, SiO2 structure on a silicon wafer. The transmission, or core, layer is thicker and has a higher index of refraction compared to the thinner buffer layer between it and the silicon wafer substrate. The core layer is coated with a cladding layer identical to the buffer layer.
The illustration below depicts a cross section of a typical waveguide structure. Currently, deposition of the core and cladding layers is accomplished by flame hydrolysis of silicon tetrachloride (with or without additives, depending on the value of refractive index needed for the layer) into silicon dioxide.
The deposition process itself takes high temperatures (>900 °C), after which the deposited film must be densified at elevated temperatures for an extended period of time. Deposition uniformity requirements limit process chamber sizes, so only a limited number of wafers (typically six or less) can be handled at one time. Increased production volume is achieved by operating multiple chambers simultaneously, providing little or no economy of scale.
In contrast, Natcore’s film growth technology enables optical-quality silicon dioxide films to be grown over large areas and on large numbers of wafers simultaneously, providing huge economies of scale and a concurrent reduction in costs.
Furthermore, because the growth proceeds at ambient temperature, several patterning and processing steps can be combined to further reduce costs. The result promises to be lower manufacturing costs for high-performance, silicon dioxide-based optical devices by a very significant margin compared to current production techniques.
The Company has several options to generate revenue in this rapidly growing market. The fastest and least capital-intensive path to market is through licensing Natcore’s growth technology to original equipment manufacturers.
The array of planar components to which the technology applies is extensive: modulators, attenuators, couplers, splitters, arrayed waveguides, tunable lasers, erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, add/drop optical mux, variable optical attenuators, etc.
Even though margins are all-important in the current market environment, optical equipment remains costly. According to several market analysis firms, the reason is straightforward: Manufacturability of components still has a long way to go.
To address this situation, two things must happen: 1) technology must be developed to enable discrete devices to be integrated into planar lightwave circuits, or PLCs; and 2) a low-cost manufacturing process for optical components must be developed. Securing these advances will offer tremendous opportunities for component vendors to capture significant market share for their products.
Use of Natcore’s technology represents a potential breakthrough in cost that could spawn dramatic growth in this market. The Company’s film growth technology requires no vacuum or high-temperature processing, making it an enabling technology for low-cost production of PLCs. Such a situation works in Natcore’s favor for securing favorable license terms. |