Semprius Lands $6.4M in Funding, Clarifies What It’s Actually Doing

Semprius today said it has landed $6.4 million in a second round of funding, but perhaps more importantly, it's explaining what it is up to.

To date, the company has been known for a proposed technique for printing semiconductors. A semiconductor is printed onto a wafer – a thing that looks like a rubber stamp then lifts the semiconductor off the wafer. That ghost image of a chip is then used to conduct signals in something like an organic light emitting diode, or OLED. Unlike other processes for making chips, the wafer substrate doesn't get chopped up and diced. It can be used several times over. (Think of this as the Jane Russell 24-Hour Bra Business Model: Lift and Separate.)

It turns out that is only about 10 percent of what the company is up to.

Ninety percent of the work revolves around an inexpensive solar concentrator for multijunction PV cells. The ultimate idea is to use these concentrators to increase the performance of very small solar cells. The concentrators measure about one inch on a side. The website doesn't really reflect what the company has been up to, according to company officials.

PV concentrators remain a controversial subject. Many concentrator companies were born at a time when silicon was in short supply. Silicon and manufacturing capacity are easy to come by, which has dented the appeal of combining more exotic multijunction chips made with gallium rather than silicon and adding a concentrator. Some have even speculated that the cost of power coming from concentrators will exceed the price of silicon.

Still, concentration can boost the efficiency of cells and the price of non-silicon PV cells could come down if and when mass manufacturing kicks in. Concentrators further help generate more power in a finite amount of real estate, so demand might be strong in urban markets. In the end, it boils down to a math problem – is this stuff a better buy in the long term than conventional solar cells – and a sense of what the future holds. It will be interesting to see.