Semi Solar caters to requirements of semicon, solar industries!

One of the ‘guilty’ pleasures of blogging is that I’ve managed to make a whole lot of friends from all over the world. It is amazing to see how much of interest folks have on India, and especially on the Indian semiconductor and the Indian solar/PV industry.

Well, one such gentleman, who I recently got acquainted with over cyberspace is Mohan Chandra, president, Semi Solar Technologies, from Merrimack, NH, USA.

Mohan’s first query to me was: “Saw your blog, which came through my LinkedIn messages. How does India plan to get onto 20 GW of solar power by 2020 without support from the silicon materials industry (viz. polysilicon through to wafers)?”

Interesting! As far as I’m aware, efforts are on to build an ecosystem here in India, so this bit would surely get addressed, if it already hasn’t!

Now, being in India, it is not easy for me to get in touch with companies based in the US, especially those in the solar photovoltaics field. Therefore, I also asked Mohan to brief me a bit about Semi Solar Technologies.

According to Mohan, he started Semi Solar technologies as a consulting company to cater to the requirements around the world in the semiconductor regime, as well as the photovoltaic industry.

“The idea was to see how best to push new and better technology through to different companies operating around the world rather than to build plants, equipment, run turnkey operations or to take up manufacturing ourselves. Things have changed considerably since we first started (which was just a little over two years ago!!

“Since the requirement of our clients have been to lean on us to put up plants and to design and build equipment. In the photovoltaic industry, we have the technology to take it from metallurgical grade silicon to silicon solar cells and modules for our clients.

“This will mean the technology to manufacture hyper pure raw material, polysilicon and then to take it through crystal growing, wafering and cell manufacture. We therefore advise how to build integrated plants or just parts of the PV plant. Very few such teams are available around the world.”

Semi Solar tries to get out in the field and if a company already exists, it attempts to see how best to introduce technology to improve the production and lower the product cost, or if it a new plant, then it would implement as many new technologies as possible to get out low cost material.

As per Mohan, Semi Solar has now put together a team of physicists, chemists, chemical, electrical, electronic, software and controls engineers. Within the team, it has more than 25 patents with many in the works mostly in the silicon area.

He added: “The coming years, we will see many of this kind of activities because of the large PV projection. So, it is one that will be slowly be taken out of the hands of the few controlling manufacturers and will become more or less a small to medium business operation with severe competition.” An interesting observation, that!