JEDDAH – Intermolecular, Inc. - accelerating research and development (R&D) for semiconductor and clean energy industries -Monday announced an ongoing project with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) for the enhancement of copper-indium-gallium-diselenide (CIGS) thin film photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing technology. The advanced metrology capabilities of the Solar and Photovoltaics Engineering Research Center (SPERC) at KAUST in Thuwal are used along with Intermolecular's High Productivity Combinatorial (HPC(TM)) platform in San Jose to rapidly learn about high efficiency CIGS solar cell materials and process interdependencies."Working with Intermolecular's team and HPC platform allows us to accelerate our mission of developing sustainable solar power," said Professor Ghassan Jabbour, Director of SPERC at KAUST. "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is focusing enormous resources on developing renewable energy technologies as part of the strategy to transform its fossil fuel-based economy in the coming decades. KAUST is at the forefront of this effort and sees CIGS technology as extremely promising in terms of its potential to deliver the lowest cost solar electricity in the Kingdom." The joint IMI-KAUST project is led by Research Scientist Dr. Jessica Eid, a member of Prof. Jabbour's team, hosted at Intermolecular's facility in San Jose, California.Sandeep Nijhawan, Intermolecular's vice president of its Clean Energy Group, said "we are fully committed to accelerating various PV technologies using our HPC platform. We recently reported progress on our patent pending sulfur-free, two-step sputtered CIGS approach with fundamental manufacturing benefits at the IEEE PV Specialists Conference (IEEE-PVSC). The breakthrough result of 17.7 percent active-area CIGS efficiency at an open-circuit voltage of 692mV - which we developed internally in less than one year - reaffirms the broad applicability of our HPC platform to rapidly advance CIGS PV. We are very excited to work with KAUST to further enhance CIGS technology and showcase our capabilities in this important region."Intermolecular's mission is to drive customers' success by transforming R&D and accelerating innovation in markets that derive competitive advantage from the interaction of materials science, processes, integration and device architecture. – SG
