We deposit amorphous Si on glass panels then dope the Si to make the junction. We get lower efficiencies than the single crystal Si but our costs are dramatically lower and we aren’t competing with the chip makers for the wafers. Si ingots are currently at $50/Kg and have gone as high as $200/Kg on the spot market. That’s a lot of money for energy and sand, but that is because it takes a lot of energy to melt Si.
I love the job because it is entirely different from what I was doing before. Well, not entirely. I was programming before, but not in a graphical data flow language. I seem to need to learn an entirely new skill set every 5 years or so to keep making money.
My skill set remained much the same for a quarter-century, but it's now changed completely thanks to my technical committees. Instead of slinging code and designing hardware, I now sling Word docs and design (and deliver) Powerpoints. This afternoon I took a corporate online course in public speaking, to try to improve my skills some more.
Wow. Thanks! Some of that I actually understood! Probably because Igor was in the aerospace field before he died, and some of it rubbed off on me.
The state of the art is such that, now that I have no more Igor, some things are beyond my ability to grasp. However, I enjoy the challenge of trying to figure things out.
(I wonder what career I would have chosen, had I not been “born too soon?”)
:o])