September 2011 - I-Micronews

PV 

Manufacturing 

SEPTEMBER 2011 

ISSUE N°13 

From Equipment and Materials to Solar Business 

INDUSTRY REVIEW 

The HCPV sector 

starts to talk 

in megawatts 

Courtesy of AZUR SPACE - Printed on recycled paper 

COMPANY INSIGHT 

Trident Solar: 

Progress on solar 

inkjet 

ANALYST CORNER 

The future of 

photovoltaics is 

inescapably about 

efficiency 

Free subscription on www.i-micronews.com

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 1 I S S U E N ° 1 3 

C O N T E N T S 

INDUSTRY REVIEW 4 

• The HCPV sector starts to talk in megawatts 

Makers of concentrating photovoltaic systems are at last installing systems 

measured in megawatts, and even getting a few utility power purchase 

agreements for future 100+MW systems. 

• Maturing HCPV supply chain looks to volume production issues 

Once the HCPV industry starts shipping hundreds of megawatts, its supply chain 

will have to transition to volume production as well. And a high volume business 

can’t be built all on custom components and custom assembly equipment. 

COMPANY INSIGHT 12 

• Trident Solar: Progress on solar inkjet 

Longer lasting print heads and combo processes could make inkjet a viable 

alternative for next generation solar cell processing. 

• ESI: Progress on laser technology opens new process options 

Tailored-pulse laser targets more precise micromachining across PV processes. 

ANALYST CORNER 16 

• The future of photovoltaics is inescapably about efficiency 

As efficiency becomes the key differentiator among solar brands, it means 

opportunity for new equipment processes and higher purity materials, 

and perhaps even for HCPV. 

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2 P V M a n u f a c t u r i n g


E D I T O R I A L 

Looking outside the mainstream at emerging 

approaches to improve PV efficiency 

Ramping low cost gigawatt-scale volume production has grown PV to a 40 GWp 

business, according to Yole Développement fi gures, but the focus is now turning 

to improving effi ciency to gain distinguishing competitive advantage in the crowded 

market. In this issue of PVManufacturing we look at the state of some emerging approaches 

to higher effi ciency solar installations, from High Concentration PV (HCPV) to developments 

in inkjet and laser components for PV equipment. 

…When overall enddemand 

slows down, 

these innovative 

solutions can help 

companies again 

generate growth… 

E V E N T S 

HCPV remains a tiny business of small-scale installations to date, but the sector made a big 

step up from mostly kilowatt-scale to multiple 1-2 megawatt-scale projects last year. The 

leading companies now have 10MW-scale or larger projects in the pipeline. Moving to these 

volumes means the HCPV sector will need to add volume automated production capacity and 

fi gure out how to work more closely with its supply chain to optimize component design for 

manufacturing—and that has potential to signifi cantly bring down costs. 

Some components suppliers are also trying to jumpstart co-design to improve performance by 

getting together to test, optimize and publish data on how different primary optics, secondary 

optics and multijunction cells work together. Concentrator Optics, Isuzu Glass and AZUR 

SPACE are testing results in mockup test HCPV modules made from their components, and 

next plan to work with equipment suppliers to design production systems for the optimal 

components. 

The recent growth of HCPV installations in the US is partly because of the favorable economics 

for the technology of high DNI desert climate conditions conveniently near big population 

centers that particularly need power for air conditioning late on summer afternoons when 

HCPV outperforms fl at plate PV, but it has also been spurred by government requirements 

for aggressive new renewable energy portfolio standards for utilities, and by local efforts to 

create manufacturing jobs. If the technology is going to compete more widely with fl at panel 

PV, it will now need “muscle, manufacturing and money” as Amonix CTO and chairman 

Vahan Garboushian says, to transition to a volume manufacturing business, and to keep 

improving effi ciency and cost as fast as the fl at plate PV sector does, when that much larger 

industry can pour vastly more resources into the effort. 

• European PVSEC 

September 5 to 9, 2011 – Hamburg, Germany 

• Semicon Europa 

October 11 to 13, 2011 – Dresden, Germany 

• PV Japan 

December 5 to 7, 2011 – Tokyo, Japan 

PLATINUM PARTNERS: 

The fl at panel PV side’s pursuit of higher effi ciencies of course continues to generate 

innovative alternatives to the common processes. And when overall end-demand slows 

down, these innovative solutions can help companies again generate growth. So we also take 

a look in this issue at recent developments in laser and inkjet technology that have interesting 

potential for new equipment processes to improve results. Controlled micromachining by 

ESI’s tailored-pulse fi ber laser is showing some interesting results for precise scribing and 

via drilling. Trident Solar is using its industrial stainless steel inkjet head that holds up to 

aggressive chemicals to develop a process for printing etchant and dopant for selective 

emitters by one pass of a single ink. 

Arnaud Duteil 

Market & Technology analyst 

Yole Développement 

duteil@yole.fr 

P V M a n u f a c t u r i n g 3 

For more information, please contact S. Leroy (leroy@yole.fr) or B. Stinson (stinson@i-micronews.com)



SolFocus HCPV module 

(Courtesy of SolFocus) 

The HCPV sector starts to talk 

in megawatts 

Makers of concentrating photovoltaic systems are at last installing systems measured 

in megawatts, and even getting a few utility power purchase agreements for future 

100+MW systems. 

“A year ago at 

Intersolar people 

asked how CPV 

worked, this 

year they asked 

how much they 

could get and 

when,” says Vahan 

Garboushian, 

CTO of Amonix. 

4 

But the real sign that the HCPV niche may 

be becoming a significant solar alternative 

is the 100MW-scale capacity HCPV module 

manufacturing the industry leaders plan this year. 

SolFocus plans to double capacity to 100MW by the 

end of the year. Amonix executives have said they 

plan to ramp to 100MW capacity by the end of the 

year. Though Soitec has yet to finalize the specifics 

for its planned new San Diego plant, local papers have 

reported a target of 200MW capacity, and production 

facilities to support the 300MW in power purchase 

agreements from San Diego Gas & Electric will need 

to be multiple times larger than the current ~30MWcapacity 

Soitec production facility in Germany. 

These planned volume plants will help move the 

niche HCPV sector towards becoming a more mature 

manufacturing business, with significant potential 

now to reduce costs by automated production, a 

supporting supply chain infrastructure, outsourcing 

or production partnerships with established volume 

assembly companies, and moving away from all 

custom components and production equipment. 

Local interest in clean tech jobs from HCPV is also 

boosting the sector, as this newer technology on the 

verge of ramping mass production currently looks like 

a better prospect for local development now that the 

flat plate solar manufacturing business is increasingly 

a big company game dominated by low-cost regions 

of the world. Soitec’s planned HCPV plant in the San 

Diego area was apparently a key sweetener for the 

PPA deals with San Diego Gas & Electric. The US 

government supported Amonix’s new $18M plant 

in Nevada with almost $6M in subsidies, then also 

guaranteed a $90M loan for its 30MW Alamosa, 

Colorado, project. The Chinese province of Gansu’s 

deal for 20MW of ZenithSolar HCPV projects also 

requires local manufacturing. And several of the 

installations at educational institutions are related to 

solar job training programs. 

P V M a n u f a c t u r i n g

I S S U E N ° 1 3 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 1 

Amonix aims to put 40MW-50MW 

of HCPV in the ground this year 

“We’ll put 40MW to 50MW in the ground this 

year,” says Amonix founder, CTO and Chairman 

Vahan Garboushian, who argues that the sector 

is finally turning the corner towards becoming 

a volume business. Work is underway on 

the 30MW installation in Alamosa, Colorado. 

Construction is also finishing up at the 5MW 

installation in Hatch, New Mexico, where tracker 

posts were in and frames on site back in the 

last available public photos of the site back 

in March. Amonix was hiring field engineers 

for commissioning and running both these 

sites earlier this summer. The company also 

dedicated a 2MW project in Tucson in April. 

Garboushian says customers are now looking for 

HCPV demonstration projects in the MW range, 

as the focus has moved from demonstrating 

the technology to demonstrating how the 

technology performs at a particular location. 

And he notes Amonix’ recently announced joint 

venture in India targeting large distributed 

generation projects in an area without the 

highest DNI, where HCPV still looks competitive 

with flat plate PV costs. 

“A year ago at Intersolar people asked how 

CPV worked, this year they asked how much 

they could get and when,” says Garboushian. 

“They’re not asking if the technology is viable 

anymore.” The maturing of the technology also 

means that the key factor for success moves 

from innovation to execution. “Now what it will 

require is muscle, manufacturing, and money,” 

Garboushian argues. 

Amonix’s uses solar grade PMMA treated with UV 

retardants for its Fresnel lenses, putting multiple 

cells on one receiver plate per Fresnel lens 

parquet, and using a secondary reflective optic of 

highly polished aluminum. “We’ve experimented 

with different materials including glass for many 

years, but we’ve been using this same material 

in the field since 1994 and it still looks robust,” 

he says, noting the acrylic’s better transmissivity 

and better manufacturing tolerance. Company 

data tests showing 0.3%-0.4% degradation per 

year suggest the modules would maintain over 

90% of their original efficiency for 25 years if 

this rate of change remained constant. Amonix 

Amonix HCPV systems (Courtesy of Amonix) 

originally produced everything except the 

lenses in house, but as production increased it 

outsourced its designs to others. Though it can 

do cell finishing in house, it buys most of its cells 

from Spectrolab and Emcore and assembles 

them in the receiver package and on the 

receiver plate, then assembles and aligns all the 

components into its megamodule. 

Compared to the more established flat plate 

PV technology, HCPV likely has much more 

headroom for improving efficiency and cost, 

though the smaller sector has much less total 

money and manpower than flat plate PV to 

Annual manufacturing capacity of some HCPV companies 

(Yole Développement, 2011, HCPV report) 

300 

250 

200 

MW/yr 

150 

100 

50 

0 

Amonix 

Renovalia 

Energy 

Green 

Guascor 

Emcore and Gold 

Isofoton MagPower Soitec Sol3G SolFocus Suntrix 

Foton 

Energy 

As of 2011 

Planned 

100 11 10 50 15 10 12 30 12 50 10 

100 NA NA NA NA NA 50 280 NA 100 NA 

P V M a n u f a c t u r i n g 

5


“Compared to the 

more established 

flat plate PV 

technology, HCPV 

likely has much 

more headroom 

for improving 

efficiency 

and cost,” 

says Milan Rosina, 

Yole Développement. 

throw at the work. Garboushian ticks off potential 

ways to gain a few percentage points improvement 

across almost all the various components in the 

systems - from better multijunction cell efficiency, to 

better pitch angles and more accurate facets in the 

Fresnel lenses, up through more accurate alignment 

in the balance of systems, which could together 

perhaps add up to as much as 50% improvement 

overall. 

Key to much of this improvement is the growth and 

increasing maturity of the supply chain. “While the 

solar supply chain continues to mature, there has 

been no shortage of innovation,” he says, noting that 

the optics and components are constantly improving. 

On the cell side, Garboushian notes that the best 

cells are already 5% to 10% better than those 

from some other suppliers, and spectral tuning for 

particular locations can add up to another 5% to 10% 

improvement in energy generation. But going beyond 

three junction cells won’t be an easy step for the 

optics and the rest of the system. 

Garboushian and Amonix have been making 

concentrating solar for some 20 years, and were 

among the pioneers of the big move from silicon to 

compound semiconductor triple junction cells for the 

boost in efficiency that did much to help create a viable 

HCPV market not so very long ago. The company’s 

early 7.8 MW-scale HCPV project with Guascor 

Foton in Spain in 2006-2008 used silicon cells, and 

depended on European government subsidies to be 

economic. Working with Emcore and Spectrolab to 

stabilize the process, prove the cell reliability, and 

redesign the rest of the system took a year, but it cut 

costs roughly in half and enabled output to jump from 

25kW to 37kW. 

SolFocus permitting 30MW project, plans 

to double production capacity to 100MW 

SolFocus is stepping up to tens-of-megawatt projects 

as well, with a 30MW power supply agreement 

from San Diego Gas & Electric now in the permitting 

process, which may be ready to start installation later 

this year. Nancy Hartsoch, VP of marketing, says the 

company also plans to increase its production capacity 

from the current 50MW to 100MW this year, by adding 

a second $10 million robotic assembly cell at its 

assembly facilities in China. 

The San Jose, California, company has installed 

projects in a dozen countries, most so far relatively 

small, essentially to test the HCPV performance 

under various conditions at different sites around the 

world. Recent larger US installations include the 1MW 

Victor Valley College project, the 1MW Nichols Farm 

pistachio processing plant, and the ~0.5MW Coachilla 

water reclamation plant, the latter two particularly 

significant because they were put together by heavy 

weight project managers Bechtel and Johnson 

Controls, suggesting these big companies think it 

worthwhile to learn the HCPV business on these 

relatively small installations for its future potential. 

Another big step: the first performance warranty 

insurance for HCPV from Munich Re. 

Though the utility market will be the bigger one, 

Hartsoch also sees a strong market for HCPV in this 

type of distributed generation, for the educational, 

agricultural processing, and water treatment markets, 

all users that tend to have big electrical bills, extra 

land already, and renewable energy goals. 

Like most of the other companies in this young 

technology, SolFocus designed and originally made 

not only its own components, but even much of its 

custom production equipment, but as volume has 

increased, it has outsourced all production. The 

company’s founders decided from the beginning to 

focus on proven glass, aluminum and steel materials, 

and on designing for manufacturability as the best 

way to create a low cost product. Major parabolic 

dish glass supplier Flabeg makes the mirrors, using 

SolFocus-designed equipment to slump a square 

mirror. One of the big electronics assembly houses 

assembles the receiver units and optical cones, and 

an assembly company in China puts together the final 

systems, using a monster press to stamp out the 

backpan in one piece, and a three-robot cell designed 

to SolFocus specifications by a company from the 

automotive assembly industry. 

Hartsoch argues that the company’s unique optics 

design may add complexity, with its third non-imaging 

optic that focuses the light down through a prism to 

more evenly illuminate the cell, the unusually wide 

1.6° acceptance angle allows more margin for some 

misalignment in assembly, installation and tracking. 

“You can lose a lot of energy for every 0.25° smaller 

acceptance angle,” she argues. 

The new generation systems just introduced swap out 

the cells for the next generation of more efficient ones, 

to boost panel efficiency to 29%, and redesign the 

modules for easier field assembly to reportedly reduce 

installation costs by cutting field installation time by 

half. The new modules add more panels per tracker, 

for fewer total trackers, and pre-assemble more panels 

into units, for fewer units per tracker to install, and no 

need for alignment in the field. The electronics are also 

now premounted on the tracker head, so no electronics 

assembly is required in the field. Hartsoch says that cut 

field assembly time in half. “And that’s with engineers,” 

she quips. “In the field with construction people it 

should be more than a 50% reduction in assembly 

time.” The relatively light dish units can be installed 

with cranes or scaffold forklifts, and can go on spread 

foundations or steel piers instead of concrete and in 

problematic soils like sand or landfills. 

6 



ZenithSolar expects to ship 1MW this 

year, two 10MW projects in pipeline 

Also now starting to ship systems for multiple new 

projects is Israel’s ZenithSolar, whose unique watercooled 

HCPV systems also supply significant amounts 

of hot water at 75°-80°C or more, hot enough for 

industrial as well as household uses. Now that the 

three-year-old company’s 250kW demonstration 

system at Kibbutz Yavne in Israel has been up and 

running for about 18 months, a half dozen other 

customers are stepping up to try the systems— 

perhaps a sign of the growing maturity of the HCPV 

sector. Zenith started shipping its first products to 

projects outside of Israel in March. It now has projects 

in the pipeline in Australia, Gulf states, Asia and Italy, 

for various applications that need a lot of hot water, 

ranging from hospitals to utility central heating plants 

to water desalinization projects. CEO Roy Segev says 

the company expects to ship a total of 1.2MW by the 

end of the year. These wattage figures totals include 

roughly one third direct production of electricity, 

roughly two-thirds the thermal energy of the hot water. 

The ZenithSolar system was designed for cogeneration, 

giving up some electrical efficiency in 

the interests of operating at higher temperature to 

create the extremely hot water needed for industrial 

applications. The dish mirror optics focus 850x-900x 

suns on a dense array of cells developed with Azur 

Space. The cell array is attached to a microchannel 

heat exchanger, similar to those used in the 

automotive industry, which heats the pressurized 

cooling water to close to 100°C so it can be piped 

away for other uses. That means the cell itself has 

to operate at a dauntingly high ~120°C, but Segev 

argues that the cells are rated to survive under these 

high temperatures, albeit with some loss of efficiency. 

Company materials also note that the cell array can 

be swapped out to upgrade the system later. 

Key to the technology, says Segev, is the company’s 

high temperature transparent encapsulation paste, 

which seals the glass directly to the cells to protect 

them from degradation from air or humidity. The 

trackers can be placed close together because they 

can tolerate some shading, as the optics consist of 

multiple rectangular facets, each about the size of 

the receiver array, and each independently continues 

to focus its light on the array, so any shading only 

reduces the concentration by that of the shaded 

facets. Like other companies in this young sector, as 

volumes have increased ZenithSolar has outsourced 

production of more of its initially internally designed 

and produced components. 

“A lot of customers were waiting to see the Yanev 

data base,” says Segev, referring to the demonstration 

project at the Israeli town of ~1000 that gets almost 

all its household hot water from the HCPV system, 

as well as all the hot water needed for its agricultural 

ZenithSolar parabolic dish system 

(Courtesy of ZenithSolar) 


7


processing businesses. The kibbutz uses high volumes of 75°-80°C 

water for sterilization in its canning plant and in its dairy, as well as for 

the heat for incubating eggs. A 5000 gallon storage tank often provides 

enough hot water for residents’ nighttime use, though of course there is 

also a backup system. The kibbutz also harvests the wine grapes from 

the vineyard under the trackers. Electricity is sold into the grid to earn 

Israel’s high feed- in tariff. 

ZenithSolar also has an agreement with the government of China’s Gansu 

province for two 10MW demonstration installations, one for centralized 

water heating for a residential neighborhood, one for a metal processing 

plant, even though purely on cost there is no way the HCPV system can 

compete with the very low rates for the cheap, low grade coal now used 

there. But the very cold and dry climate at 2000M elevation at the edge 

of the Gobi desert has very high DNI that should be ideal for HCPV, the 

systems would reduce the heavy pollution from burning the low grade 

coal, and ZenithSolar has agreed to move manufacturing there for clean 

tech local jobs and, presumably, technology development. Details will 

take a while longer to work out before production starts. 

“Things are changing very fast in China,” says Segev. “China, India and 

Africa will be most of the solar market in the future just because most 

of the energy need will be there.” 

Paula Doe for Yole Développement 

Vahan Garboushian, Founder, Chief Technology Officer, and 

Chairman of the Board of Directors, Amonix 

Mr. Garboushian has pioneered the development of concentrated 

photovoltaic (CPV) technology since launching Amonix in 1989; 

his passion, vision, and leadership over the past 20 years have made 

Amonix the most efficient, reliable CPV technology on the market today. 

Nancy Hartsoch, Vice President of Marketing and Business 

Development, SolFocus 

She is responsibe for the company’s global marketing activities and 

ROW business development activities. Nancy is also currently the 

Chairman of the CPV Consortium, a global industry organization in the 

CPV market segment. Prior to joining SolFocus she was CEO of Pacific 

Technology Group which she co-founded in partnership with Taiwan-based Acer 

Labs Inc. (ALi) to provide marketing, sales and applications engineering to launch 

an existing product line into the global market. Her 25 years of technology 

experience include five years as COO and VP of Marketing and Sales for Ali. 

Roy Segev, Founder & CEO, ZenithSolar 

Roy has close to 20 years of experience in Israeli and global 

high-tech businesses. In 2006, Roy founded ZenithSolar in order to 

provide comprehensive energy via a distributed network. Prior to 

founding ZenithSolar, Roy was a partner at Sadot, a venture capital 

fund that invests in early stage technology companies. Previously 

Roy was responsible for the finance and business development of “Magink_, 

a leading company in the digital ink technology for signs and billboards. 

Roy holds a B.Sc. in Physics and Mathematics from Hebrew University and a 

M.Sc. from Boston University. 

8 


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Maturing HCPV supply chain looks 

to volume production issues 

Once the HCPV industry starts shipping hundreds of megawatts, its supply chain will 

have to transition to volume production as well. And a high volume business can’t be 

built all on custom components and custom assembly equipment. 

step is to work with assembly companies to design 

efficient production processes for these components. 

Then HCPV makers won’t have to do the iterations of 

the optics design themselves, but they can choose 

the appropriate balance of performance vs cost, and 

the tooling will already be there. “Customers can 

then buy components off the shelf, like in a mature 

industry,” says Leutz, noting that some users might 

for example prefer the lighter weight of PMMA, while 

others installing in areas with frequent sandstorms 

may prefer more scratch-resistant glass. 

Concentrator Optics 

Fresnel Lens Parquet 

(Courtesy of Concentrator Optics) 

“Performance 

data that we can 

talk about 

will help the 

bankability of the 

whole sector,” 

explains Ralf Leutz, 

Concentrator Optics. 

10 

Some helpful steps would be openly available 

data on the performance of some HCPV optics 

components, coordinated optimization of 

the design of the primary and secondary optics to 

work together, and coordinated optimization with 

manufacturing technologists to design efficient volume 

production. So Concentrator Optics founder and GM 

Ralf Leutz cooked up a plan to work with secondary 

optics supplier Isuzu Glass and cell and receiver maker 

AZUR SPACE to make test mockup HCPV modules 

to compare various combinations of three different 

Fresnel lenses, two different secondary optics and two 

different multijunction cells, to get module performance 

data that could be released publicly. “With tighter 

tolerance budgets, the design of the primary and 

secondary optics have to be optimized together with 

multiple iterations, but when we make these products 

for customers we can’t share how results compare to 

other designs or materials,” says Leutz. “Performance 

data that we can talk about will help the bankability of 

the whole sector.” Aiming for quick results, the three 

companies each simply supplied their components for 

the mockup modules for testing. 

Early results are showing relatively small differences 

between PMMA and silicone-on-glass (SOG) Fresnel 

lenses, and are quantifying the difference between the 

relatively higher performance kaleidoscope secondary 

optics and the lower cost half-egg alternatives. With 

the data on the optimized optical designs, next 

“We’ve played with the process long enough,” asserts 

Leutz. “There will have to be some standardization.” 

He argues that though leading companies will 

continue to distinguish themselves with their 

particular technologies, much of the industry will 

go to a mainstream volume production option using 

Fresnel lenses, secondary optics and triple junction 

cells. “Once the HCPV industry gets to a few hundred 

megawatts, it will start to look a lot more like the 

flat panel PV market,” suggests Leutz. “The key issues 

will move beyond technology, to the financing, the 

marketing, and the big companies. We have to be 

prepared for that.” 

While a second tier of upstart HCPV players might 

economically ramp production of these more standard 

systems, currently all the leading HCPV systems 

makers choose quite different options to optimize 

their systems. Soitec uses SOG Fresnel lenses but 

skips the secondary optic for easier and cheaper 

manufacturing, and instead compensates with extra 

accuracy in its trackers. Amonix uses lighter acrylic 

Fresnel lenses for its large units, but with a low cost, 

reflective aluminum secondary optic. SolFocus uses 

mirrors for both the primary and secondary optics, 

but does use a rod-shaped refractive third optic to 

gain a particularly large acceptance angle to allow 

more tolerance for imprecision in assembly and 

installation. 

Isuzu Glass: Design for manufacturing, 

optimization with primary, may reduce 

secondary optics cost 

Systems makers have had to design their solutions 

without fully knowing manufacturing costs for their 

custom designed components. Molded glass optics 

specialist Isuzu Glass reports that many HCPV 

companies have come to it with their designs for


secondary optics to convert the Fresnel spot to more 

homogenous light, to avoid hotspots that can damage 

the cell, and to allow a wider acceptance angle for 

better performance with less strict requirements 

for accuracy on the part of the tracker. However, 

typically, says Isuzu sales manager Mehmet Sinan 

Ata, the module makers provide the glass maker with 

the drawings for the glass parts, and then discover 

afterwards that their design is not possible to actually 

manufacture for anything close to the $1 or so per 

unit target price they expected, so few have yet to 

move the systems to volume production. 

“Then to eliminate 

shipping costs, the 

optics production 

lines will have to 

be located close to 

the final assembly 

of the modules,” 

added Leutz. 

The high cost of the precision molds and tooling make 

high performance molded optics expensive unless 

those costs are spread over high volumes, so initial 

requests for quotes for relatively small orders are 

expensive, and not particularly profitable nor of much 

interest to the optics companies that churn out lenses 

for projectors and cell phone cameras in serious high 

volumes. Costs can however be reduced by making 

the lenses as small as possible, and keeping the 

shapes simple and rounded for easier molding. 

“We’ve gotten many inquiries from different companies 

with totally different module designs, and we are 

currently supplying several module manufacturers’ 

pilot plants around the world, but so far none have 

moved into high volume production,” says Ata. “We 

decided to work with other components suppliers 

to help push development ahead faster, instead of 

waiting for the market, to help the business move 

ahead more quickly.” 

Supply chain matures towards 

automated production, 20-year 

warranty for solar acrylic 

Leutz argues that the challenge of high volume, low 

cost production of precision optics can effectively be 

met only with full automation, and with a parallel 

production system to replicate all units from one initial 

master, at high speed and high optical quality. “This 

automated high volume production system does not 

fall out of the sky,” he notes. “Even companies that 

wanted to do it in house are needing partners.” Then 

to eliminate shipping costs, the optics production lines 

will have to be located close to the final assembly 

of the modules, which currently realistically means 

plants in the southwestern US. 

Concentrator Optics makes Fresnel lenses in both 

acrylic and silicone on glass, and Leutz argues that 

the differences are actually relatively minor. “Concerns 

over PMMA yellowing or cracking are issues of the 

past,” he asserts. Only PMMA has been under the 

sun for 20 years, but accelerated test results on both 

materials look good. Major PMMA supplier Evonik and 

Concentrator Optics now offer a 20-year performance 

warranty for lenses made of their UV-enhanced 

material, developed specifically for solar to let in more 


Rod lens (Courtesy of Isuzu Glass) 

light and be more stable under extreme temperatures. 

Processing that heats the material thoroughly before 

embossing to avoid introducing stress also helps to 

avoid cracking or corrosion later in the field. SOG 

meanwhile remains slightly more expensive because 

of the material costs. 

AZUR SPACE: Clear roadmap to 45% 

cell efficiency 

AZUR SPACE also joined the project with Concentrator 

Optics and Isuzu Glass to try to help push the HCPV 

market along to more serious volumes, designing 

the receivers for the systems. “The most important 

thing is that HCPV needs to start deploying tens of 

megawatt projects,” says Gerhard Strobl, director of 

business development, AZUR SPACE Solar Power. “It 

needs volume to decrease costs—though it also needs 

to decrease costs to get to volume.” 

Efficiency of the multivolume cells is key to the 

efficiency—and ultimately the cost—of the HCPV 

systems, and luckily also perhaps the part of the 

system with the clearest roadmap for significant 

improvement. AZUR says it is currently shipping 40% 

efficient cells, aims at 42% in two years by moving 

from lattice matched to metamorphic cells, and then 

to four junctions for 45% efficiency in 4-5 years. In 

the long run 50% cells will be possible, says Strobl. 

AZUR has sufficient capacity to make the terrestrial 

cells on its existing lines for space applications, and 

steady demand for additional volumes that allowed 

the lines to run steadily at higher output would be 

key to maintaining tight process control and reducing 

costs. Based on optics from Concentrator Optics and 

Isuzu Glass, AZUR is able to deliver essentially offthe-shelf 

receivers for Fresnel systems and dense 

array receivers for mirror systems. 

“One gigawatt of HCPV means four square kilometers 

of lenses and 160 million secondaries and cells,” 

notes Leutz. “This is a challenge the supply chain is 

prepared for.” 

Paula Doe for Yole Développement 

Dr. Ralf Leutz, 

co-founder, CTO and 

CEO, Concentrator 

Optics 

He is also author of the 

book Nonimaging Fresnel 

Lenses: Design and Performance of Solar 

Concentrators (Springer, 2001). He 

earned his PhD from Tokyo University of 

Agriculture and Technology. 

Mehmet Sinan Ata, 

Sales Manager, Isuzu 

Glass Deutschland 

Dedicated to the company’s 

optical glass, lenses and 

color filters across the 

optoelectric, medical and photovoltaic 

industries. Previously he did overseas 

procurement for DMW Corp. in Japan. He 

has a masters degree from Rheinische 

Friedrich-Wilhelms-University in Bonn, 

Germany. 

Dr. Gerhard Strobl, 

Director Business 

Development, AZUR 

SPACE Solar Power 

GmbH 

Dr. Gerhard Strobl is now 

with AZUR SPACE (or its predecessor 

companies) since 25 years. For many 

years he was responsible for the space 

silicon solar cell development and later 

for the GaAs triple junction development 

within AZUR. Under his responsability 

AZUR introduced in 2003 the first fully 

European space triple cell with 25% 

efficiency (AM0, 25°C), in the last years 

he and his team improved the technology 

and the cells to 30% for space (AM0, 

25°C) and 40% for CPV (500x AM1.5d, 

25°C). 

Since 2007 as director business 

development, he is not only responsible 

for all R&D topics, but also for bringing 

new products such as CPV cells and 

receivers to customers and to the 

market. 

11



Trident Solar: Progress on solar inkjet 

Longer lasting print heads and combo processes could make inkjet a viable alternative 

for next generation solar cell processing 

Steve Liker, 

Director of Sales & 

Marketing, Trident Solar - 

Trident Industrial Ink Jet 

Inkjet printing has been a hard sell to the solar 

industry to date, but it’s one possible option 

for solving some of the process issues as the 

industry moves to thinner wafers, better contacts, 

and selective emitter and back contact patterning. 

Trident Solar says new inkjet technology may now 

be ready to do etching and doping in one step, at 

2000-3000 wph, with improved reliability. 

There’s likely a limit to how much more the 

industry can improve the efficiency of contacts 

screen printed with porous paste, pushing the 

sector towards electroplating, while efforts to 

reduce costs continue to push towards thinner 

wafers that require non-contact printing of fineline 

seed layers. “We’ll need a non-contact process 

and narrower lines,” argues Steve Liker, Trident 

director of sales and marketing. “All the arrows are 

pointing away from screen and laser.” Trident Solar 

is a division of graphics print head and ink supplier 

Trident Industrial Inkjet in Brookfield, Connecticut. 

The company is introducing a single-step etching 

and doping ink for printing selective emitters 

in concert with screen printing metallization 

fingers. One of the components in the etching 

solution is a phosphoric acid, which first etches 

through the SiNx layer when heated, then as the 

temperature increases further begins to work as a 

phosphor n-dopant. Trident worked to develop the 

material for a year and half with partner Cookson 

Electronics, who will produce the solution. Trident 

is working with Roth & Rau’s OTB Solar and other 

integrators to provide the wafer handling and 

transfer, and to market and service the tools. That 

same Roth & Rau unit already markets competing 

screen printing and laser systems for these same 

applications. 

The next step in development is to also add the 

chemistry to print a seed layer for electroplating 

the contacts with the same etchant/dopant ink, 

so all three steps for forming the selective emitter 

and seed layer could be printed in the same pass. 

It would, however, also be possible to minimize 

process steps by a separate print head or a 

separate printing pass on the same tool. 

The technology is still in the R&D stage at 

customers, with most interest currently focused on 

selective emitters and emitter wrap through, says 

Liker, though some customers are also looking 

at patterning back contacts. There’s also some 

interest from thin film solar makers for etching and 

Trident 256 Jet Solar printhead (Courtesy of Trident) 

12 



metalizing vias. Here too Trident is working on development of an 

ink that can do both the etching and the metallization in one pass. 

Liker argues that non-contact inkjet processing for etch, doping and 

metallization will result in higher yields than either screen printing 

or laser processes, especially for high efficiency processes on 

thinner wafers. Better lasers do ablation or vias with less damage 

than the older lasers, but reportedly still do some damage to the 

morphology of the textured silicon top surface for selective emitter 

processes, and around the via holes for back contact processes, 

while the sector now expects ever less wafer loss. “It used to be 

acceptable to have 0.5% to 1% scrap,” notes Liker. “But now the 

goal is 0.1% scrap.” 

Liker reports the company has solved some of the nagging 

reliability issues with inkjet in production by designing a print head 

specifically for solar applications, made of stainless steel so it can 

hold up to aggressive liquids, from 2-14 pH, for jetting things like 

phosphoric acid and KOH etchants. The company claims its head 

lasts at least 5x longer in production with acids than earlier print 

heads adapted from the graphics industry. Trident’s piezoelectric 

piston design draws fluid into the chamber when the piston pulls 

back, then pushes forward to eject the fluid out the nozzle. This 

high pressure produces droplets as small as 7pl, and enables thicker 

fluids to be jetted. 

Focus so far has been on single pass, single step process applications, 

where one or two of the four-inch heads can cover the entire wafer. 

That simplifies handling to merely passing the wafer under the head, 

allowing target speeds of typical solar rates of 2000-3000wph. 

Patterning can be done on the fly by digitally selecting when to open 

which of the 256 holes across the head. 

Inkjet printing is of course already a well established high speed 

industrial process. Trident Industrial Inkjet has been making ink 

jet heads and inks for the graphics printing industry, used in high 

speed, low cost printing of thing like packaging and bar codes, for 

more than 30 years. The industrial inkjet business is one of the 

many businesses of Illinois Tool Works (ITW), a $16B diversified 

manufacturer of fasteners, components and materials for everything 

from the auto industry to industrial packaging, commercial food 

equipment to chemicals. 

www.trident-itw.com 

Steve Liker, Director of Sales & Marketing, Trident Solar 

Trident Industrial Ink Jet 

He has 31 years of experience in the engineering and marketing of Piezoelectric 

Ink Jet printheads for industrial applications. His experience prior to joining 

Trident-ITW was as an Engineer in the field of ink jet development with 

Dataproducts and Exxon Office Systems. Mr. Liker holds five patents in ink 

jet technology. He has a B.S. degree in Physics from Upsala College in New 

Jersey, U S A. 

P V M a n u f a c t u r i n g 11



ESI: Progress on laser technology 

opens new process options 

Tailored-pulse laser targets more precise micromachining across PV processes 

Richard Murison, 

CTO and Director 

of Product Marketing, 

PyroPhotonics Lasers 

One interesting option for faster, cleaner 

material removal process steps could be 

tailoring the temporal shape of the laser 

pulse to precisely control the micromachining. 

Already in mass production use for DRAM repair, 

such tailored pulse lasers are slated to be 

integrated into solar scribing production systems 

for all three scribes for CIGS thin film solar cells by 

the first half of next year. 

Supplier ESI says the ability to customize the shape, 

height, and width of the laser pulse nanosecond by 

nanosecond, independent of the repetition rate, 

enables higher quality P2 and P3 scribes on CIGS 

at lower cost than the current mechanical scribing. 

The company reports encouraging research results 

as well for scribing ZnO and CdTe on glass with less 

damage, and for drilling holes at high speeds for 

emitter wrap through applications. 

where it offers higher throughput than the current 

needle scribing process, avoids the need to stop 

to change the scribing needle as it dulls, and may 

potentially allow the scribes to be spaced closer 

together as space no longer has to be left to 

allow for chipping. Though the system is not yet 

in production, PyroPhotonics co-founder and CTO 

Richard Murison says the company is talking to 

most of the major CIGS makers and almost all of 

the thin film solar scribing equipment integrators. 

“First we have to convince the CIGS maker that the 

process works, and then they hand it off to their 

preferred integrator, so the process takes a while,” 

notes Murison. His co-founder Tullio Panarello, 

now GM, says that some customers trying the 

more expensive competing pico-second lasers 

are finding issues with heat damage on one of the 

scribes so are coming back to consider the tailored 

pulse option. 

Tullio Panarello, General 

Manager of the Laser 

Business Unit, ESI 

ESI (Portland, Oregon) acquired the technology 

by purchasing startup PyroPhotonics Lasers 

(Montreal, Canada) to assure its supply of the 

lasers for its memory business, but the company 

is now targeting the potentially far larger solar 

market for laser processes. First market driver 

is for P2 and P3 scribing passes for CIGS cells, 

Murison also reports some success scribing ZnO 

on glass, where the alternative process for the 

P1 scribe has been difficult to control precisely 

enough to avoid either leaving cracks in the glass 

on the one hand, or else not cleanly scribing away 

the oxide. But tailoring the laser pulse to start with 

a large spike and then reducing to a lower intensity 

CIGS scribing by time domain tailored-pulse laser (Courtesy of ESI) 

14 


I S S U E 1 3 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 1 

is said to cleanly remove the oxide without 

damaging the glass. Work on the P1 scribe for CdTe 

thin film shows potential to reduce process steps 

by leaving intact a barrier layer which prevents 

sodium from the soda-line glass diffusing into 

the scribe and poisoning the CdTe. Typically the 

CdTe P1 scribe removes the barrier layer and must 

therefore be backfilled with a planarizing filler to 

avoid sodium diffusion. The tailored pulse laser, 

however, can etch precisely through only the TCO 

on the architectural glass substrate, leaving the 

underlying SiO 2 

barrier layer intact. 

Other work with the Fraunhofer Institute in 

Michigan found that the shaped beam laser was 

much faster than conventional lasers for drilling 

the thousands of hole per second across the 

wafer needed for emitter wrap through solutions. 

Practical mass production of EWT will likely need 

drilling some 10,000 holes across the wafer at 

one wafer per second without too much damage, 

while a conventional 100W laser can only do about 

4,300 holes per second. ESI’s 25W tailored-pulse 

laser drilled 6,800 holes per second in the tests 

in the Fraunhofer lab. Murison says ESI has since 

made considerably more improvement in its own 

lab as it has learned more about how light actually 

interacts with silicon. The solution turns out to be 

tailoring the pulse to first heat up the silicon before 

hitting it hard, which enables the material to use 

the available energy more efficiently. Typically 

a laser drills quickly down through the first part 

of the hole as the silicon melts, but then about 

halfway through the process slows down as the 

silicon starts to boil and vaporize, filling the hole 

with silicon plasma that absorbs the laser light. 

The relatively low 25W power of the ESI pulseshaped 

laser currently limits the throughput of 

removal processes, and so limits use for a number 

of c-Si solar laser applications. The company 

is currently working on the tricky business of 

developing a higher power version, as pulsetailoring 

is typically only possible at relatively 

low power. Unlike a standard Q-switching laser, 

where the energy is stored up then all released 

in one flash that can’t be precisely controlled, the 

fiber laser’s low power continuous beam can be 

shaped by an optical modulator. The PyroPhotonics 

technology controls the modulator by changes in 

voltage, for faster response rate than changing 

the current. The beam must then be amplified to 

be most useful. The founders say their approach 

allows very precise control of the shape at low 

power, so the beam remains tailored even through 

the distortions created by amplification. 

www.esi.com 

Richard Murison, CTO and Director 

of Product Marketing, 

PyroPhotonics Lasers 

Richard Murison received his BSc in 

Physics from Loughborough University of 

Technology, UK and is Chief Technology 

Officer and Director of Product Marketing 

at PyroPhotonics Lasers, a subsidiary of 

ESI, Inc. 

Tullio Panarello, General Manager 

of the Laser Business Unit, ESI 

Tullio Panarello serves as the General 

Manager of the ESI’s Laser Business Unit. 

Mr. Panarello joined ESI in September 

2010 following the acquisition of 

PyroPhotonics Lasers, Inc. He co-founded 

PyroPhotonics in 2003 and served as the 

company’s CEO. 

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15


A N A L Y S T C O R N E R 

The future of photovoltaics is 

inescapably about efficiency 

As efficiency becomes the key differentiator among solar brands, it means 

opportunity for new equipment processes and higher purity materials, and perhaps 

even for HCPV. 

Milan Rosina, 

Market and Technology 

Analyst, 


As gigawatt-scale production in low cost 

regions has pushed the cost of solar modules 

down sharply, the balance of systems and 

installation costs have come to account for a larger 

percentage of total system costs, making higher 

efficiency for each module an increasingly important 

way to reduce all these area-related costs. But with 

the current oversupply of commodity modules, 

efficiency is also becoming the key differentiator 

for solar brands, providing visibility and indicating 

quality and reliability. 

That means increasing user interest in new process 

equipment technologies to improve efficiency, 

and in higher purity materials. It also means the 

competitive advantage will increasingly accrue 

to high volume producers with stable control of 

their process, making it harder for small players 

to successfully bring alternative technologies to 

market. And as all technologies continue to improve 

in cost and performance, those with more limited 

potential for improving efficiency - like amorphous 

silicon - will get left behind, while those with 

greater potential efficiency may have the ultimate 

advantage. 

Demand for higher efficiency opens 

opportunity for equipment makers 

to supply new processes 

The drive for efficiency means increasing customer 

interest in low cost solutions for improving 

performance, particularly in those areas with big 

potential impact from relatively modest changes 

to the total cell design or process flow, such as 

decreasing the width and increasing the conductivity 

of metallization lines, adding selective emitters, and 

going to some back-contact designs. Screen printing 

will likely hit a wall in 2-3 years, to be replaced by 

some sort of plating. The industry is also going to 

move to thinner wafers, not just to reduce costs, but 

also to improve efficiency by reducing the impact of 

defects: by reducing thickness of the material with 

defects through which the photons and electrons 

must travel. That will open opportunities for gentler, 

non-contact processes like inkjet printing and laser 

ablation. 

Development status for different PV technologies showing an increasing potential 

for high efficiency PV technologies 


Efficiency at module level 

30% 

22% 

14% 

12% 

11% 

10% 

9% 

8% 

6% 

Very high efficiency - Low 

volume production 

High efficiency - Mass 

production 

Medium to low efficiency - 

Mass production 

Very low efficiency - Very low 

production (R&D stage) 

DSSC 

-V 

HCPV 

CIGS 

C-Si 

CdTe 

a-Si/μc-SI 

a-Si 

“Moving 

target” 

5% 

Organic 

Fundamental 

research 

Industrial 

research 

Pilot Medium volumes 

Development status 

Mass production 

>1GW 



Inkjet has high potential for non-contact deposition 

of etchants, dopants and metals, though the process 

can be slow, and the fast-drying materials can easily 

clog the tiny nozzles to limit performance, presenting 

needs for new inks, new head designs and cleaning 

processes, and perhaps new solutions to recognize 

and correct print areas where blocked nozzles 

have impacted deposition quality. Lasers also have 

considerable potential for innovative improvements 

to solar manufacturing, as their highly-localized 

heating allows precise control of micromachining 

with little thermal stress or mechanical damage for 

fine geometry features on delicate thin wafers. Both 

inkjet and laser production processes are already 

well established in other high volume industries, 

which could accelerate the development of solar 

applications. 

Higher quality cells require purer, 

higher-performance materials, more 

controlled processes 

Improving solar efficiency will also require purer 

materials and more careful control of processes 

for contamination. As cell efficiency starts to get 

closer to theoretical limits, after 18% or so, eking 

out the next round of gains will mean paying 

more careful attention to the small stuff. The PV 

industry will need to evolve beyond its focus on 

high speed automation modeled on that of the 

automotive industry, to start to look more like the 

semiconductor industry - with its obsession with 

contamination control and process monitoring, and 

its practices of filter use, cleaning technologies, and 

keeping humans away from the processing. Gases, 

de-ionized water and other standard materials 

for PV production will all move to higher levels of 

purity and quality. On the cost reduction front, 

replacing silver metallization with copper could gain 

a significant advantage, but some reliability issues 

with corrosion and Cu migration into the silicon 

remain, necessitating additional buffer and capping 

steps that add back costs. 

Demand will move to higher purity 

polysilicon as well 

PV makers are increasingly demanding higher 

quality polysilicon as well, for higher efficiency cells. 

Yole Développement projects that demand will 

move to semiconductor grade material—9 nines to 

11 nines purity—essentially displacing solar-grade 

poly almost entirely in the market. With a backlog 

of solar module supply built up in inventory, and 

slowing demand from the cutbacks in government 

incentives, demand for poly this year looks likely 

to come in considerably below last year’s 160,000 

MT, leaving an oversupply in the sector. The four 

leading suppliers Wacker Chemie (Germany), 

Hemlock Semiconductor (Michigan, US), OCI 

(Korea) and GCL Poly (China), who are all providing 

semiconductor-grade material, together have enough 


capacity among them to supply the entire PV 

industry demand this year. With no constraints 

on availability, it will be the higher purity material 

from these leading suppliers that sells, and enough 

demand for it to maintain poly prices stable at 

around $50/kg this year. Many of the new entrants 

who more recently added poly capacity have found 

it harder than expected to optimize this complex 

chemical process to match the leading pure-play 

players in quality and cost, and many will likely 

quietly get out of the business. 

HCPV efficiency could provide an edge, 

if sector and supply chain can scale to 

volume 

Long term trends towards efficiency could bode 

well for the future of HCPV, and this still barely 

commercial technology has wide margin to bring 

down costs if it moves to volume production. HCPV 

now reaches 29% efficiency at the module level at 

leading suppliers, compared to 17%-20% for the 

top flat panels, and it has even more of an edge in 

hot climates, as its performance degrades less at 

temperature. 

Plenty of hurdles remain, however, for this 

complicated new technology. Appropriately sunny 

locations remain limited, long term reliability remains 

unproven and actual commercial production so far 

remains insignificant. Though HCPV suppliers claim 

that the technology can deliver the lowest levelized 

cost of energy with the least use of land on some 

sites, the actual results can vary significantly for 

particular location, climate and topography, so even 

big users first want to try small test installations on 

their sites, and this small installation stage could 

continue for some time. Meanwhile, the large flat 

panel PV sector is continually investing its far bigger 

resources into improving its efficiency and bringing 

down its costs. While HCPV may have big potential 

with enough investment, with the market still so 

small, the sector has limited resources to put into 

development. 

The supply chain of key components on which 

HCPVsystems depend has even less to invest, as the 

total markets for each of the various components, 

from epi wafers to lenses to trackers, remain even 

smaller still. Progress will depend on getting to big 

projects to get volumes up to bring down costs, 

by spreading the fixed costs of the 25MW-50MW 

capacity HCPV plants over megawatt and not just 

kilowatt-scale projects, and fully automating both 

component production and system assembly - and 

finding the significant capital to invest to do so. 

Perhaps even more important will be finding the 

solutions for the most effective business models or 

working partnerships among the parts of the supply 

chain. As volumes grow, HCPV systems makers 

17 

“Lasers also have 

considerable 

potential for 

innovative 

improvements 

to solar 

manufacturing, 

as their highlylocalized 

heating 

allows precise 

control of 

micromachining 

with little 

thermal stress 

or mechanical 

damage,” 


Yole Développement


HCPV supply chain - Positioning of the HCPV players: three scenarios 


“HCPV systems 

makers are largely 

outsourcing 

production of their 

custom component 

designs to 

optics makers, 

tracker makers 

and electronics 

contract 

assemblers,” 



are largely outsourcing production of their custom 

component designs to optics makers, tracker makers 

and electronics contract assemblers. But it is difficult 

for the system makers to best optimize the system 

cost and performance without knowing exactly how 

design choices will impact manufacturing costs at 

the supplier, or how one component can best be 

optimized to work with another component made 

by someone else. Optimizing the system requires 

careful balancing of all the parts, trading off more 

complicated and expensive optical systems for less 

accurate trackers or vice versa, or adjusting the 

characteristics of the primary optic to those of the 

secondary optic, and that’s hard to do by separate 

players. 

The fragmented sector is equally a problem from the 

supplier side. Suppliers argue that the components 

could be better designed for efficient low cost 

manufacture if the designer knew something about 

the manufacturing process, and that components 

could be better optimized to work together if they 

were designed together. Tracker makers complain 

that they have no visibility into if the market is big 

enough to support development of custom trackers 

for modules of entirely different size, weight, and need 

for accuracy. Designing custom components for each 

separate system maker’s kilowatt-scale projects is a 

very low volume business, with volumes sometimes 

only in the hundreds of units, often too small a 

business to be of much interest for the supplier, and 

too small for efficient volume production. 

Much depends on the successful performance of the 

early megawatt-scale HCPV projects now coming 

on line to build credibility for the technology. But 

building the first larger 10s and 100s of megawattscale 

installations will also require business 

models that enable optimized system design and 

foster a viable supply chain to support volume 

manufacturing. 

www.yole.fr 

Milan Rosina is analyst at Yole Développement for 

photovoltaic market & technologies. He received 

his Ph. D. in 2002 from the INPG in France. He 

gained experience as a research scientist in several 

renowned R&D institutions & industrial companies 

where he worked in the field of microelectronics, PV, 

LED & nanotechnology. 


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About Yole Développement 

Beginning in 1998 with Yole Développement, we have grown to become a group of companies providing market research, technology analysis, 

strategy consulting, media in addition to finance services. With a solid focus on emerging applications using silicon and/or micro manufacturing 

Yole Développement group has expanded to include more than 40 associates worldwide covering MEMS and Microfluidics, Advanced Packaging, 

Compound Semiconductors, Power Electronics, LED, and Photovoltaic. The group supports companies, investors and R&D organizations worldwide 

to help them understand markets and follow technology trends to develop their business. 

CONSULTING SERVICES 

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More information on www.yole.fr 

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CONTACTS 

For more information about : 

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Editorial Staff 

Board Members: Jean-Christophe Eloy & Jeff Perkins – Media Activity, Editor in chief: 

Dr Eric Mounier – Editor in chief: Arnaud Duteil- Editors: Arnaud Duteil, Milan Rosina, 

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September 2011 - I-Micronews

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