Institute For The Future

The changing uses of silicon in Silicon Valley

Following on Anthony's Future Now post on the future of solar power, the Mercury News has a long article on solar power in Silicon Valley:

 

The "silicon" in Silicon Valley doesn't mean what it used to. Today, more silicon is used as the raw material in the making of solar cells than in the production of the semiconductor chips that run computers.

Realizing this, some big Silicon Valley companies with their eyes on the future are adopting a strategy of diversifying into solar cell production, which uses some of the same manufacturing equipment used to make semiconductor chips.

Cypress Semiconductor started getting into solar power a couple years ago, investing in SunPower. Now,

Applied Materials, the world's biggest maker of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, announced that it was launching a major push to sell the machines that make solar cells in factories that resemble chip plants.

"Our aim with this strategy is to bring the cost of building solar cells down," said Mike Splinter, chief executive of Applied Materials in Santa Clara. "We think it enables the solar market to grow faster. We are going to see an explosion in the factory growth."...

Factories that make the solar cells use some common equipment with semiconductor manufacturing, but most solar cell factories don't cost nearly as much as $2 billion chip factories. Splinter said that solar factories are going to become more expensive to build as companies try to build bigger factories to keep up with demand.

Existing smaller solar cell factories can churn out enough solar cells in a year to produce 25 megawatts of energy. By 2010, the newer factories will have 10 times as much capacity, Splinter said.

 

As Christophe Lecuyer argues in his recent, and very smart, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970, expert knowledge about manufacturing was critical to the rise of Silicon Valley: despite the dot-com boom, the growth of search and software companies, and the more recent pressures to outsource software and design jobs to cheaper labor markets, one essential core of the Valley has been an incredible amount of knowledge about how to make very, very complicated stuff. It seems that that core knowledge still has a future.