Issued patent
Single Crystal Semiconductor Silicon-Germanium (SiGe)
An issued NASA patent from the Technology Transfer catalog.
About this technology
Overview
With 4x faster carrier mobility and less energy loss than single crystal silicone, single crystal SiGe offers increased processing power and decreased size, and power demands for a unit of the same size. These capabilities exceed current market options for semiconductors. In solar cell applications, SiGe offers new design features that improves its efficiency to 30~40% and the operational life to ~80 years. SiGe is also a comparatively more abundant resource, lower cost and non-toxic, unlike standard solar materials. With SiGe production technologies suite consistent quality production and lowered production costs and waste can be ensured while maintaining expeditious production. Once production is operational, the processes are expected to be equivalent in manufacturing cost to poly-crystal SiGe.