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Introduction

It's only been a blink of an eye since the solar PV industry was living off the chip industry's table scraps repurposing left-over wafers and melting down the cut-off ends of silicon ingots to make solar cells. Now the solar industry consumes more high-purity polysilicon than the semiconductor industry and is rapidly pulling away as it grows by leaps and bounds. Solar cells are in fact oversized photodiodes, often included with other semiconductor devices in technology classification trees.

But the solar PV industry is different, primarily because it is from the outset an upstart challenger in one of the world's largest commodity markets, the market for electrical power production. It is a potential energy game-changer, switching the emphasis from building big power plants to building big plants that manufacture the elements of distributed power generation. The technology and manufacturing innovations used in solar are related to those of the IC industry—but they are also profoundly different—in ways that chip-industry veterans need to understand clearly as they contemplate the possibilities, opportunities, and potential pitfalls of the burgeoning solar industry.

In its new Solar Energy: Growth Opportunities for the Semiconductor Industry report, IC Insights explores and analyzes this important growth market for the first time with an eye to the interests of participants of the semiconductor industry in gaining a clear understanding of solar technologies and markets and finding ways to exploit existing and upcoming opportunities.