President’s Message

Natcore has achieved a number of successes this past year, resulting in the significant expansion of both our technology and research capabilities.

The agreement with the ZhuZhou Hi-Tech Zone in China and the two Chinese companies is no doubt the most dramatic. This joint venture will allow us to plug into a network of end users in China, which is the world’s largest and fastest growing producer of solar cells. It is a huge step in moving us out of the lab and into a manufacturing line.

I do not want this great success in China, however, to overshadow the many achievements that led to it and, no doubt, will lead to other ventures in the United States and around the world. I would like to tell you about some of the basic research and development work that is contributing to our successes.

Integrating the business and scientific experience of our management team has been a prime factor in our rapid growth. For example, early in the year, we signed a research agreement with Rice University and The Barron Research Group to begin development of our super-efficient tandem solar cell application.

Until now, tandem solar cells have been producible only under highly-controlled lab conditions at very high costs. Natcore’s process, however, has the potential to enable mass production of tandem cells at lower costs per watt than anything available today. Natcore envisions the manufacturing of a tandem cell consisting of up to three cells, arranged one on top of the other, starting with an ordinary silicon solar cell. A cell interconnect comes next, then a second cell made of silicon quantum dots and engineered to absorb light from the middle of the spectrum. A second cell interconnect follows, then a third cell, which is another silicon quantum dot device engineered to absorb the blue end of the spectrum. We anticipate the combination, operating in tandem, will produce well over 30% efficiency, or about double the power output of current technology.

Shortly after the Rice/Barron research agreement was signed and funded, Natcore acquired another company, NewCyte, Inc., and all its intellectual property — including technology related to liquid phase growth of silicon dioxide on a class of materials called fullerenes. NewCyte also had technology, resulting from an Air Force research contract, that had specific application to our tandem solar cell project. We had identified this exciting technology and felt it would be complementary to Natcore’s photovoltaic goals. Specifically, the NewCyte technology incorporated quantum dots in the basal region of a tandem cell to improve both the beginning-of-life and end-of-life performance of the gallium arsenide middle cell used in space solar applications. NewCyte was able to determine the proper number of layers of quantum dots, their most desirable size and the best location of the aggregate of layers within the cell.

Although the application and materials are somewhat different when used with satellites, this technology remains important to Natcore, because tandem solar cell development is similar whether used in space or on earth. We feel the integration of this successful technology has allowed us to take a giant step forward in developing a super-efficient solar cell for mass production.

In addition to our research at Rice, we’ve also employed two PhDs to advance our anti-reflective (AR) film technology in laboratory facilities at Ohio State University. The purpose of this project was to produce the necessary testing data and process-flow steps to take Natcore’s AR film growth technology out of the laboratory and into the production line of a solar cell manufacturer. For the first time, we grew the antireflective coating on silicon wafers ourselves, at a variety of thicknesses with consistent uniformity and reflectance capabilities. Testing results confirmed that our application met or exceeded industry norms, and at dramatically lower costs.

Our success at the Ohio State laboratories has allowed us to create samples suitable for presentation to solar cell manufacturers as potential customers, and samples have already been presented to four such companies.

In summary, we have made exciting progress on many fronts but remain focused on delivering products to the marketplace as soon as possible. Although we understand the great importance of our research, our primary goal is the conversion of that research into bottom-line revenue.

Charles R. Provini
President & CEO