“We are excited to work with NSWC DD to solve advanced warfighter needs,” says Dr. Martin Pralle, vice president of business development at SiOnyx. “SiOnyx’s technology is ideally suited for imaging applications in tactical environments and we are pleased that the DoD recognizes these benefits.” The primary focus of the contract will be to develop enhanced focal plane array designs for tactical imaging systems. The contract, including all options, is valued at $3M.

This award builds on support by ONR and the Night Vision Electronic Sensors Directorate (NVESD) to develop infrared enhanced silicon detector designs.

Importantly, SiOnyx Black Silicon boosts efficiency in thinner wafers, vital for reducing the cost of silicon-based solar cells. Average efficiencies of 16.9% were achieved for 150-micron thick multicrystalline cells that are 20% thinner than wafers in production today and represent a cost reduction of 10-15%. All cells were processed and tested at ISC Konstanz using a standard emitter, screen-printed metal, and aluminum back surface field. Black Silicon texturing was performed using a Coherent (NASDAQ: COHR) AethonTM tool with a TaliskerTM picosecond laser.

Additionally, the SiOnyx process results in a significant improvement in process uniformity. Standard deviations for cell efficiency and current are reduced by a factor of two using SiOnyx’s Black Silicon, resulting in further cost reductions through improved process yield and tighter efficiency binning.

“These results are further validation of the Black Silicon process and its ability to improve the economics of mainstream solar energy – and the technology is ready now,” commented Stephen Saylor, President and CEO of SiOnyx. “SiOnyx’s single-sided texture achieves significantly lower surface reflectance than industry-standard isotexture to improve cell performance. We boost infrared performance, thus making SiOnyx Black Silicon a great complement to existing selective emitter technologies.”

SiOnyx Black Silicon is a drop-in solution for the majority of solar cell lines using industry standard isotexture and is critical in supporting roadmap architectures requiring a planar back surface for dielectric passivation. SiOnyx Black Silicon is completely independent of grain orientation and therefore ideal for all wafer types including multicrystalline. By decoupling the saw damage removal and surface texturing steps, the SiOnyx process is the perfect solution for manufacturers seeking to improve both the price and performance of existing lines while establishing a roadmap for next-generation cells using backside passivation with local contacts.

For additional product and licensing information please contact SiOnyx Solar at smees@sionyx.com.

“The addition of a strategic partner and two top-tier venture capital firms to our series B syndicate underscores the tremendous economic potential of SiOnyx’s innovation,” said Stephen Saylor, CEO of SiOnyx. “Our early success in delivering record-breaking performance in applications from simple light detection to thin-film photovoltaics has fueled our momentum. With this new funding, SiOnyx will launch our first commercial products and expand the suite of solutions offered to our strategic partners.”

SiOnyx is commercializing a fundamentally new semiconductor processing technique that represents a breakthrough in the development of smaller, cheaper, high-performing silicon photonic devices. The company recently demonstrated record-breaking photosensitivity in collaboration with the Army Research Office (ARO) and is currently working with a number of industry and government partners to advance the use of its technology.

“Coherent’s investment in SiOnyx, one of our strategic partners, reflects our confidence in the company and its technology to help us capture new opportunities in the photovoltaic industry as it continues to expand towards grid parity,” said John Ambroseo, Coherent President and Chief Executive Officer.

Vulcan Capital, the venture investment firm founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is impressed by SiOnyx’s novel technology platform. Venture partner Jill Watz added: “We expect the disruptive nature of SiOnyx’s technology to create entirely new product categories and deliver powerful performance enhancements to the multi-billion dollar market for silicon photonics.”

Based on a novel laser implant method first discovered at Harvard and commonly referred to as ‘Black Silicon,’ SiOnyx’s patented semiconductor process dramatically enhances the performance of light-sensing devices across a range of applications in the consumer, industrial, medical and defense industries.

About Coherent, Inc.

Founded in 1966, Coherent, Inc. is a Russell 2000 Index company and a world leader in providing laser-based solutions to the commercial and scientific research markets. For more information about Coherent, including product and financial updates, visit our website at http://www.Coherent.com.

About Crosslink Capital

Founded in 1989, Crosslink Capital is a leading stage-independent venture capital and growth equity firm with over $1.5 billion in capital under management. Crosslink was among the first and largest investment firms in the U.S. to integrate public and private technology investing. This strategy allows Crosslink to partner with its portfolio companies on a long-term basis. With more than 20 years behind it, Crosslink Capital has invested in over 90 private equity portfolio companies, including Miller Heiman, Omniture (acquired by Adobe Systems) Pandora, SeaMicro, Twin Creeks Technologies, Virage Logic, and Yipes (acquired by Reliance Communications). For more information on Crosslink, visit http://www.crosslinkcapital.com.

About Vulcan Capital

Vulcan Capital is the private investment arm of Vulcan Inc., the company founded by Paul G. Allen in 1986 to manage his philanthropic and business initiatives. Vulcan Capital is focused on generating long-term value appreciation across a multibillion dollar portfolio, which spans diverse industry sectors and investment asset classes, ranging from early-stage venture investments to public equity value investing, leveraged buyouts, acquisitions, and distressed situations.

Dr. A. Fenner Milton, the US Army NVESD’s Director noted, “NVESD is interested in approaches to low light level imaging that have the potential for leveraging silicon technology to reduce costs.”

SiOnyx is commercializing a fundamentally new semiconductor processing technique that represents a breakthrough in the development of smaller, cheaper, high-performing silicon photonic devices. Based on a novel laser implant method first discovered at Harvard and commonly referred to as ‘Black Silicon,’ SiOnyx’s patented semiconductor process dramatically enhances the performance of light-sensing devices across a range of applications in the consumer, industrial, medical and defense industries. Under the ARO grant, SiOnyx has shown the applicability of its technology to CMOS image sensors and other mass-produced photonic devices used in demanding imaging and photo-detecting applications.

“Signal-to-noise ratio and dynamic range dictate the ultimate performance in any photonic system,” said Stephen Saylor, CEO of SiOnyx. “In applications ranging from medical imaging to digital photography, these basic device characteristics underlie the quality of experience. The record-setting results shown in our work with the ARO are astounding and demonstrate once again how SiOnyx’s technology platform has the potential to dramatically alter performance in these multi-billion dollar industries.”

With the completion of this milestone and resulting performance breakthroughs, SiOnyx is now leading newly sponsored programs with the US Army’s NVESD and DARPA that will advance the use of Black Silicon in low light and infrared imaging.

Dr. Nibir Dhar, Program Manager in DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office, added, “High-performance, low-cost, small infrared cameras at room temperature will have significant impact on many aspects of modern war fighting. Black Silicon offers an enabling pathway in low-cost CMOS camera development for near-infrared applications.”

Sargent is the former CEO of Oerlikon Solar and brings more than twenty years of technology management experience to support the rapid advancement of SiOnyx’s technology platform. Commonly referred to as “Black Silicon,” SiOnyx’s novel laser processing technique dramatically enhances the electro-optical performance of photonic devices in a range of applications from simple light detection to advanced digital imaging and photovoltaics. Devices built using SiOnyx’s proprietary process deliver hundreds of times more sensitivity to light than traditional silicon, representing a significant breakthrough in the development of smaller, cheaper, high-performing photonic devices.

“SiOnyx has made tremendous strides over the past year, proving the potential of its novel and patented implementation of black silicon across a variety of industries and applications,” said Bob Metcalfe, a member of SiOnyx’s board of directors and general partner at Polaris Venture Partners. “We welcome Jeannine and know that she will be a valuable addition to the team.”

In addition to leading Oerlikon Solar, Sargent has held executive roles in other engineering-intensive organizations including Veeco, Voyan Technology, Gasonics International and Tencor Instruments (now KLA-Tencor). She is currently at Crosslink Capital working in their Energy and Core Technology/Semiconductor Practice.

“I’m extremely impressed with results demonstrated to date incorporating SiOnyx’s shallow junction photonics technology and believe the application of this technology in the solar and image processing industries could be a game changer,” said Jeannine Sargent. “I look forward to working with the team at SiOnyx to bring this innovative and value creating technology to full commercialization.”

Stephen Saylor, president and CEO of SiOnyx, Inc. added, “Over the past year, collaborations with the DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Program, other government agencies and industry partners have proven the viability of our unique implementation of black silicon in solar applications. SiOnyx’s shallow junction photonics platform dramatically enhances the light collection properties of traditional cell architectures while reducing the overall cost of manufacturing. These successes are resulting in a growing interest in SiOnyx from the solar industry, and we are pleased to have the benefit of Jeannine’s experience and expertise as we continue to pursue advanced applications of our technology.”

Read Related Article at PV-Tech

Stephen Saylor, President and Chief Executive Officer of SiOnyx commented, “Partnering with Coherent gives SiOnyx access to the industry’s most advanced ultrafast laser technology and allows us to continue the rapid pace of advancement of the Black Silicon platform. With this collaboration, we look forward to demonstrating the scalability of our process beyond the initial applications of photodetection and imaging and exploit the compelling benefits of Black Silicon’s enhanced quantum efficiency in the solar industry.”

“We are excited that this agreement brings together SiOnyx‘s unique process expertise with Coherent ultrafast laser technology to increase the pace of development in this exciting area,” said John Ambroseo, Coherent’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “Together with our rapidly growing solar tools business, it will position both companies to capture new opportunities in the photovoltaic industry as it continues to expand towards grid parity.”

About Coherent, Inc.

Founded in 1966, Coherent, Inc. is a Russell 2000 Index company and a world leader in providing laser-based solutions to the commercial and scientific research markets. Please direct any questions to Dave Clark, product line manager at (408) 764-4030, e-mail Dave.clark@coherent.com. For more information about Coherent, including product and financial updates, visit our website at http://www.Coherent.com.

Read Related Article at PV-Tech

The need for inexpensive infrared (IR) light detectors in the commercial, medical, and defense industries is driving rapid development of new IR sensing materials and architectures. While there are high-performance material systems for detecting wavelengths in the IR, such as indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) and mercury cadmium telluride (HgCdTe), these systems are expensive, suffer from reliability issues, and often require additional operating complexity (for example, cooling).

Alternatively, silicon is inexpensive and robust, thanks to an enormous manufacturing infrastructure and wealth of process knowledge. These factors, combined with excellent quantum efficiency in the visible spectrum, make silicon the undisputed leader of the light detecting and imaging world. However, the native band-cutoff wavelength and absorption properties of standard crystalline silicon lead to diffuse imagery in the near-infrared (NIR) spectral region and insensitivity in the short-wave infrared (SWIR) spectral region.

Making silicon see in the IR

FIGURE 1. Black silicon structures are fabricated using an industrial CMOS process.

Even so, the low cost and scale of silicon-based technologies is so significant that innovators strive to push the boundaries of silicon functionality. Rather than build up a specialized manufacturing infrastructure, it is more attractive to incorporate other semiconductor materials with silicon, or otherwise modify the properties of silicon in a manner that is compatible with the established silicon infrastructure.

FIGURE 2. The responsivity of a black-silicon detector exceeds that for standard silicon in the visible and NIR, and is competitive with InGaAs and germanium in the SWIR.

Black silicon is an emerging material in the race to modify silicon for IR detection.5 Black silicon (see Fig. 1) is produced in a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible manufacturing process that uses short-pulse lasers to dramatically alter the photoconductive and absorptive properties of silicon. Photodetectors made of black silicon significantly increase the sensitivity of silicon to NIR and SWIR radiation, as well as greatly enhancing response in the bandwidth over which silicon is typically photosensitive. With the IR sensing properties of black silicon, true digital day-night imaging could become as pervasive as visible digital photography is today.

Femtosecond-laser technology is the enabling technology for black silicon. Formed through irradiation with a ultrafast laser in a sulfur hexafluoride atmosphere, the resulting black silicon comprises a highly sulfur-doped, nanostructured surface layer that exhibits room-temperature photoconductive gain and enhanced IR absorption. The manufacturing process is simple, fast, and uses standard silicon fabrication materials and temperatures.

Femtosecond lasers are unique in that they create intense localized conditions in a nearly instantaneous manner without disturbing regions outside the focal volume. For this reason, the industrial use of femtosecond-laser technology has been centered on cutting and drilling applications. However, by using ultrafast lasers in a different context–localized engineering of material form and composition–exciting new opportunities for industrial use of femtosecond lasers are being discovered, such as those presented by black silicon.

Photoconductive gain and absorption

FIGURE 3. The absorption depth in standard silicon detectors is longer at IR wavelengths, leading to reduced detection.

Gain in a photodetector is the phenomenon by which a single photon results in the collection of more than one electron-hole pair by the sensing circuit. “Avalanche” gain and “photoconductive” gain are the most commonly observed gain mechanisms in photodetectors. Whereas avalanche gain (or avalanching) relies on high internal fields and the collisional ionization of atoms within a photodetector, photoconductive gain relies on an asymmetry between the device transit times for electrons and holes in a detector device.6

In comparison to avalanche gain, photoconductive gain operates at low biases and with low noise–characteristics that offer significant advantages for circuit integration, low power operation, and performance. As a result, photoconductive gain is an important attribute of a number of II-VI compound-semiconductor, quantum-well, and cadmium sulfide detectors. In fact, photoconductive gain is one reason cadmium sulfide has the highest room-temperature detectivity (a measure of sensitivity) of any photodetector material.

Black silicon enables the first silicon-based photodetectors with efficient, room-temperature photoconductive gain–reaching responsivities of more than 100 A/W in the NIR (see Fig. 2). As such, the amount of signal generated for each photon is comparable to Si avalanche photodiodes, without the added complexity of high voltage and protection circuitry that accompanies avalanche photodiodes. The increased signal from photoconductive gain significantly reduces the burden of signal processing by downstream electronics.

In addition to gain, femtosecond-laser processing modifies the absorption properties of silicon. Through a combination of defect engineering and increased optical-path length, black silicon can dramatically reduce the amount of silicon needed to absorb NIR and SWIR light.

For normal silicon CMOS imagers, the absorption depth of photons in the NIR is so long that most of the light passes through undetected. This is because a CMOS imaging architecture uses less than 10 µm of Si material in the active sensing region. High-performance silicon charge-coupled devices (CCDs) have a very thick sensing region, but remain transparent to wavelengths in the SWIR (greater than 1100 nm), making detection next to impossible (see Fig. 3).

The incorporation of black silicon into a detector significantly reduces the absorption depth of NIR and SWIR light so that electron-hole pairs are generated in a thickness of silicon comparable to those used in the CMOS manufacturing process. The combination of increased absorption and high-efficiency photoconductive gain allows the capture and detection of low levels of IR light and opens up a host of new applications to silicon, such as digital night vision, at an affordable cost.

Using black silicon in the NIR and SWIR

Applications for the NIR and SWIR regions are numerous and span the medical, manufacturing, consumer, and defense industries. One of the larger development efforts to use the NIR and SWIR is the pursuit of digital night vision by the defense and security industries. A large amount of ambient light is available over this bandwidth from the natural phenomenon of airglow. Airglow is the emission of light from chemical reactions in the Earth’s atmosphere and contains three prominent spectral peaks between 1000 and 1800 nm. Because silicon cannot perform well enough beyond 1000 nm to be considered an option for digital night vision, typically germanium or InGaAs devices are used in this spectral range. However, these materials are difficult to manufacture in scale, and are noisy and cost-prohibitive for pervasive use on the battlefield or for security cameras.

In contrast, detectors made from black silicon have very high response in the 1000 to 1200 nm range, with responsivity 100 times higher than germanium or InGaAs. Black-silicon devices with sensitivity from 400 to 1550 nm have been produced and work continues with short-pulse-laser material modification to increase sensitivity to wavelengths beyond 1300 nm. The black-silicon laser process opens up a wealth of possibilities for defect engineering through incorporation of activated chemical species to levels difficult to achieve in silicon through more traditional doping methods.

In addition to digital night vision, the region from 1000 to 1200 nm is important in silicon-wafer and solar-cell inspection, plastics sorting for recycling, and noninvasive blood-chemistry monitoring. Specific to the world of lasers, the availability of inexpensive but powerful light sources makes 1064 nm a particularly important NIR wavelength for applications such as free-space communication and laser detection and ranging. However, 1064 nm falls in a region of decreased performance for silicon, germanium, and InGaAs. Silicon rapidly loses sensitivity and has virtually no sensitivity beyond 1050 nm (particularly when cooled) and germanium and InGaAs detectors are at less than 50% of their peak detectivity at 1064 nm. Black-silicon detectors, on the other hand, are near their peak performance at 1064 nm and have higher detectivities than the incumbent commercial technologies.

Read Full Article at Laser Focus World

Dr. James E. Carey, SiOnyx Inc. co-founder and principal scientist, holds a black silicon wafer in the cleanroom at company headquarters in Beverly, Mass.

I recently sat down with Stephen D. Saylor, CEO of SiOnyx, and Dr. James E. Carey, its co-founder and principal scientist, at the company’s headquarters in Beverly, Mass., which is about 20 miles northeast of Boston.

Carey and Saylor told me that the potential applications of black silicon are numerous because it could be employed wherever silicon is currently used: in computers, satellites, cameras, mobile phone cameras, solar panels and radiological imaging equipment.

“We believe that the technology meets its highest purpose in the commercial markets,” Saylor said. The industry for silicon chips in mobile phone cameras alone is $7 billion, out of a $200 billion global market for silicon. “To get venture capital, you have to show that there is a big (market), and there is a big (market) in black silicon,” Saylor said. SiOnyx has raised $11 million in venture funding from RedShift Ventures, Polaris Venture Partners and Harris & Harris.

Black silicon is superior to conventional silicon because it is 100 times more sensitive to light. It also is sensitive to a broader spectrum of light – from the short-wave UV to the infrared. Therefore, black silicon could be used to make solar panels that capture more of the sun’s rays and cameras that are more sensitive to light.

On the other hand, detecting light may no longer be such a concern for engineers who design cameras once they get their hands on black silicon. “Very seldom do (camera engineers) have too much light, too much signal,” Saylor said. Imagine if camera engineers had a material that is 100 times more sensitive to begin with. It would free them of design constraints.

The broad spectral sensitivity of black silicon makes it attractive for infrared security cameras. Because ordinary silicon cannot absorb in the infrared at all, other materials, such as germanium or indium gallium arsenide, are used. However, these materials are expensive and toxic to humans, whereas black silicon is nontoxic and can be made inexpensively.

Black silicon may have a medical benefit as well because the radiation dose that a patient receives from CT scanners and other radiological equipment is directly proportional to the sensitivity of the detector. Black silicon does not detect x-rays, but radiological imagers contain a component called a scintillator that converts the x-rays into light that black silicon can detect.
Black silicon photonic test structures. Such structures are commonly used in the development of new semiconductors to help design engineers and device physicists optimize performance and reliability.

Eureka moment

Black silicon was discovered by chance in Dr. Eric Mazur’s lab at Harvard. The researchers focused a femtosecond laser on silicon chips in the presence of sulfur hexafluoride gas, which is commonly used to etch circuits in semiconductors. Once the researchers turned off their equipment, they noticed that the surface of the silicon chip had turned black. They thought they had burned the surface, according to Carey, Mazur’s former graduate student.

A closer look at the black silicon with an electron microscope, however, revealed that the surface had rows and rows of spikes all over it. The rows appear neatly arranged on the surface, almost as if someone placed them there on purpose. It turns out that these spikes give black silicon its unique color and properties.

Most researchers would have stopped once they had made the surface of silicon black, but the researchers in Mazur’s lab chose to investigate why it turned black. “That’s something credited to professor Mazur,” Saylor said, “If you had a lab where a professor was micromanaging (his students), this never would have happened.”

Mazur also is known for his work toward improving higher education by modifying or eliminating traditional lecture classes. He founded SiOnyx with Carey in 2006 and currently serves on its scientific advisory boards.

Forming a company

After obtaining the patent license from the university, the company hired Saylor. Saylor has an engineering degree and got his start in companies such as Apple, Polaroid and Technion. He started his own company, FlashPoint, and then worked for Adobe Systems before becoming CEO of SiOnyx. “I was an engineer who got frustrated that people on the business side didn’t understand the technology,” he said.

Black silicon test pixels, which are used to optimize imaging performance.

Of the company’s current employees, 95 percent are experienced engineers. If SiOnyx sounds like an exciting start-up to work for, Saylor said, “We’re always looking for good people.” He emphasized that, besides experience, potential hires must be able to fit within the company’s culture.

SiOnyx recently opened an office in Portland, Ore., because that city shares cultural similarities with Boston and because of the concentration of engineers with experience working with semiconductor materials.

Processing a black silicon wafer in a chamber.

Saylor said the company wants to get black silicon into the hands of people who can work the raw material into circuits and sensors that can be placed into electronic devices. The company already has made a prototype of a common integrated circuit called a CMOS chip.

The price of the products that the company will offer will depend on the market. “A cell phone chip might cost less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks,” Saylor said, “but a chip in a satellite might cost …” “more than Starbucks,” Carey added, as if on cue.

Read Full Article at Photonics

Some companies have dropped off the list — otherwise known as the Silicon 60 — because they have been acquired; some have moved on to an initial public offering of shares; and others have moved beyond the list with the passage of time. As they have matured other, younger startups have been nominated to be moved off the EE Times radar list and on to the main list. In version 8.0 of the EE Times Emerging Startups list, are companies selected by editors based on a mix of criteria including: technology, intended market, maturity, financial position and investment profile.

The startups on the Silicon 60 list are the companies involved in semiconductor technologies for analog circuits, memory, logic and power, MEMS, optoelectronics, EDA software, foundry manufacturing, semiconductor production equipment, electronic subsystems, packaging and materials that have made an impression on EE Times editors. They are emerging companies to watch — for a wide variety of reasons.

Readers are welcome to nominate their own emerging startups for inclusion in a future iteration of the EE Times 60 Emerging Startups list. Nominations should be supported by a short citation explaining why the company is suitable for inclusion on the list.

SiOnyx’s Entry

SiOnyx Inc. (Beverly, Mass.),has licensed a portfolio of shallow junction photonics patents developed by Harvard University in exchange for an unspecified equity stake and downstream royalties. The company was founded in 2006 by Professor Eric Mazur and James Carey to exploit the optoelectronic properties of so-called black silicon.

Read Full Article at EE Times

Dr. Homayoon Haddad, previously Vice President of Advanced Sensor & Pixel Development for MagnaChip Semiconductor, has joined SiOnyx as Vice President of Device Engineering. Leading the company’s west coast team, Dr. Haddad is responsible for next generation shallow junction detector and image sensor development. During his tenure with MagnaChip, Dr. Haddad managed the development of 2.2, 1.7, and 1.4 um pixel technologies and released the first 1.75 um color BSI sensor in 2007. Prior to MagnaChip, Dr. Haddad spent more than 20 years at Hewlett Packard and Agilent where he held a variety of technology management and engineering roles.

Dr. Haddad’s team consists of top engineers and scientists, each with decades of experience in the design, development and mass production of image sensors from industry leading companies such as Micron (NYSE: MU), HP (NYSE: HPQ), Agilent (NYSE: A), Avago and Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN).

SiOnyx CEO Stephen Saylor noted, “SiOnyx is fortunate to have acquired such outstanding talent with combined experience of more than 50 years in the image sensing and detecting market. Industry interest in devices made from black silicon is very encouraging, and Dr. Haddad and his team will be instrumental in accelerating the delivery of new products to market.”

SiOnyx is producing devices that represent the first and only known, low cost, highly scalable platform for hyper-spectral imaging. The SiOnyx implant method is compatible with established semiconductor manufacturing processes and introduces no new material.

“Black silicon offers incredible promise in the sensing and detecting markets where engineers have suffered for decades with the limited response of silicon,” said Dr. Haddad. “It’s 100 times more sensitive to light and incredibly thin, making Black Silicon a true breakthrough in the development of smaller, cheaper, high performance imaging systems.”

Read Related Article at Mass High Tech

Black Silicon

Black silicon, originally invented in a Harvard lab entirely by accident, demonstrates a broader spectral response than conventional silicon and requires a much smaller electrical bias to act as an avalanche photodiode. It combines these advantages in a very thin-layer material, producing a potentially disruptive technology for a range of applications.

“This is a photonics platform that is going to be important in detection, imaging and eventually power generation,” said Stephen Saylor of SiOnyx, the US company that has licensed Harvard’s black silicon patents. “It is a brand new material with new properties, and it is compatible with the existing infrastructure of silicon processing.”

The SiOnyx process exposes the silicon target to high-intensity femtosecond laser pulses in the presence of sulphur hexafluoride. The process changes the chemistry of the silicon surface and also transforms it from a smooth shiny wafer into a nano-structured surface absorbing almost all of the visible light striking it.

“The surface becomes covered with thousands of very ordered microspikes,” said Jim Carey of SiOnyx. “We now know that the material’s photonic behaviour results from a combination of the morphology and the changes to the material chemistry. The microspikes are dramatic, but not critical.”

The black silicon can respond to light from 400 to 2500 nm, covering wavelengths that silicon-based devices could not previously detect. In addition, the bias voltage needed to create a cascade of electrons from an incoming photon can be much lower than the voltage previously needed in a silicon material.

Low bias

The first area to benefit is set to be photodetectors. “In the past, photomultiplier tubes, avalanche photodiodes and intensifier tubes have used brute-force mechanisms to detect very low signal levels,” said Saylor. “We can make diodes with a better response than the best avalanche photodiodes on the market, but at a bias of just 2 or 3 V.”

The measured optical responsivity of 100 A/W at 950 nm demonstrates a 100-fold increase in sensitivity over traditional detection methodologies. This equates to an external quantum efficiency of 10,000%. This performance is achieved at a mere 3 V of operational bias, enabling direct integration with hybrid and digital circuitry. The extension of silicon’s spectral sensitivity to 1550 nm could have significant implications for laser-sensing applications at the 1064, 1330 and 1550 nm nodes.

“Photomultiplier tubes, avalanche photodiodes and the like all use brute-force mechanisms to try to detect very low signal levels,” said Saylor. “This has been very limiting in terms of how you can apply them. Detectors in positron emission tomography, for example, are very expensive and have a large footprint because of the biases that they need to run at. A responsive detector operating at low bias would improve the resolution, cost and reliability of these systems.”

Using a more sensitive detector could also allow a reduction in the X-ray dosage needed in radiological examinations. “This would be a tremendous potential benefit, just in socio-human terms,” noted Saylor.

Consumer cameras that are able to take better photographs in low light could be another benefit, allowing the use of cheaper and simplified lens technology.

Broad response

Black silicon’s broad spectral response could also be exploited in photovoltaic cells. “For the first time we have a low-cost process allowing the generation of electron-hole pairs from the infrared wavelengths that normally pass straight through silicon,” Saylor explained.

SiOnyx’s shallow-junction technique creates an ultra-thin absorbing layer capable of absorbing light energy across the electromagnetic spectrum in just 300 nm of device thickness. Shallow-junction photonics promotes the integration of detectors with other circuitry and holds the promise of ultra-thin-film solar cells with a fraction of the required silicon bulk material.

SiOnyx believes that its discovery will be disruptive in photonics technology for the long term. “It takes time to incorporate a brand new photonics platform into existing infrastructure, but we think that the technology is surprisingly resilient,” said Saylor. “As with any new photonics material, in 20 or 30 years we will still be discovering new ways to improve it.”

Having licensed the patents from Harvard, SiOnyx is seeking partners to adopt the technology in real-world applications. “We are more of a process development company than a product development company,” commented Saylor. “Our main interest is to work with very well capitalized strategics that find this technology enabling in their product lines. For us, that’s a great way for a small company to make rapid progress, by aligning with market leaders.”

Read Full Article at Optics.org

Figure 1. Responsivity of a black silicon photodetector as compared to commercial silicon, germanium, and InGaAs photodiodes. Responsivity is the amount of current detected for a given amount of light power. Images courtesy of SiOnyx.

About a decade ago Dr. Eric Mazur, professor of physics at Harvard University, and several of his graduate students discovered a remarkable material known as “black silicon.” Curious about what would happen if they irradiated silicon with a femtosecond laser, the group placed an ordinary silicon wafer in a vacuum chamber, filled it with chalcogen-containing gas, and blasted the silicon with ultra-short, super-intense laser pulses. The result was a blackened surface covered with a vast array of microscopic spikes that proved to be up to 500 times more sensitive to light than a standard silicon chip (Fig. 1). SiOnyx, a spin-off company, was formed in 2006 to commercialize black silicon-based photonic devices for a variety of industries.

“We’re producing detectors with APD-like response (>100A/W) at low operation bias (<3 V) that are capable of scaling to imaging arrays that will address important market applications where ambient or artificially produced illumination is limited," says Stephen Saylor, CEO of SiOnyx. "Our detectors also exhibit extended wavelength response, with proven performance in short-wave infrared frequencies (SWIR). This further enhances black silicon's applicability to applications in medical imaging, machine vision, night vision, and solar energy."

The Silicon Conundrum

Figure 2: An array of small black silicon pixels. Arrays of photodetectors are used to take pictures, as in a digital camera. Figures 3 and 4, below: Scanning electron micrograph of black silicon surface with micrometer-scale spikes.

Silicon detectors are commonly used in photonic systems. Although it is effective for detecting visible light, silicon is virtually useless for detecting other wavelengths, such as SWIR. In fact, between one-third and one-half of solar energy that passes directly through silicon cannot be captured. To overcome this limitation, scientists have made detectors from more exotic materials such as indium, gallium, arsenide, lead, and cadmium to capture infrared light. Although these do the job, some are very expensive to produce and others are extremely toxic to humans and the environment.

“Another limitation with silicon is that it cannot be doped to high levels because its saturation point for most elements is very low,” says Mazur. “However, by irradiating silicon with high-intensity laser pulses as short as one billionth of a millionth of a second, in the presence of dopant-containing gas (typically H2S or SF6), dopant concentrations in the silicon can be increased by 10,000 times or more.”

Once the chemical structure of the silicon is disrupted by the laser, dopant compounds enter the structure and become “locked in” as the substrate cools and recrystallizes. The result is a highly doped (nanocrystalline silicon containing 1.6% sulfur), 200- to 300-nm-thick, shallow-junction interface that is thousands of times more sensitive to light than conventional semiconductor materials.

“In a normal semiconductor, impurities (dopants) take very particular energy states, usually inside the band gap (the range of energies in a semiconductor that are forbidden for any native electron to take),” says Mazur. “With black silicon, we have introduced so many impurities that they no longer take individual states and instead begin to form a band, thus changing the band structure of the material.” Because a material’s band structure determines most of its interesting device properties, this technique may allow SiOnyx to redesign materials to behave in different (and potentially more desirable) ways.

Black silicon results in near-unity absorption from the ultraviolet to the short wave infrared. It also exhibits large photoconductive gain at room temperature, with a quantum efficiency greater than one. Because all this action occurs in the 200-300 nm shallow-junction interface, it is possible to make detectors that are 100 to 1000 times thinner than a standard silicon device. “Silicon is known as an indirect absorber of light, which means that photons cannot be absorbed on their own, but must be assisted by a vibration of atoms within the material, which we call a phonon (rather than photon),” says Mazur. “On average, it takes hundreds of microns of thickness of silicon to ensure that most photons will find a phonon and be absorbed. Black silicon does not share this characteristic: all photons can be absorbed in the first few hundreds of nanometers (versus the first few hundreds of microns for standard silicon).”

Prototype Devices

Figure 3. A microscopic picture of black silicon test circuits.

Black silicon’s unique physical characteristics will revolutionize photonic device architecture.SiOnyx has successfully incorporated black silicon into new silicon devices that show high efficiency, room-temperature photoconductive gain, broad-spectral silicon photodetection, and enhanced near-infrared photovoltaic response.

Point-detector photodiodes made from black silicon absorb about 90% of light at visible and infrared wavelengths ranging from 400 to 1550 nm. The measured optical responsivity of 100 A/W at 950 nm is 100 times more sensitive than standard detection methodologies-an external quantum efficiency of 10,000%. This gain is achieved at a mere 3V of operational bias, enabling direct integration with hybrid and digital circuitry. “The extension of silicon’s spectral sensitivity out to 1550 nm has profound implications for laser sensing applications at the 1064, 1330, and 1550 nm nodes,” says Saylor.

Black silicon will also redefine silicon based imaging. The shallow-junction laser processenhances silicon’s detector response by a factor of 100 or more, allowing the creation of 1 µm2 of black silicon pixels that produce more signal than 36 µm2 of traditional silicon pixels. The improved photoconductive gain results in each photon producing nearly 100 electrons. The ability of black silicon to capture visible and infrared photons within a thin half-micron layer also solves the problem of crosstalk and red/infrared sensitivity issues.

What’s Next

SiOnyx has entered several partnerships to expand its research on black silicon. MIT professor Tonio Buonassisi is using the synchroton at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to determine where the dopants are located in the lattice structure. Professor Alberto Salleo at Stanford University is conducting photothermal deflection spectroscopy experiments. “We don’t have any results yet, but I’m excited that so many other groups are helping us understand the origin of these interesting properties in heavily doped semiconductors,” says Mazur.

“We have a material that performs like an exotic semiconductor but enjoys the economic benefits of scale,” says Saylor.”We also have theability to leverage the manufacturing scale of the standard CMOS fabrication infrastructure.The SiOnyx process is conformable to a variety of fabrication environments and device specific architectures.For the first time in the history of photonics, we can produce silicon devices that are competitive with the unique opto-electronic characteristics of exotic materials, in an environmentally safe way, with results that exceed even the most advanced implementations of this legacy technology.”

Read Full Article at SPIE

Black silicon, a novel laser implant technique that radically alters the photonic properties of semiconductor devices, was discovered by Harvard’s Eric Mazur, Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, who holds a joint appointment in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

A highly light-absorbent material, black silicon absorbs nearly twice the visible light of regular silicon and detects infrared light that is normally invisible to silicon based devices, a capability that allows for dramatic performance enhancements in applications ranging from simple light detection to advanced digital imaging and solar energy.

In consideration for licensing the patents, Harvard has received an equity position in SiOnyx and will received downstream royalties. SiOnyx has also recently raised $11 million in funding from Harris & Harris, Polaris Venture Partners and RedShift Ventures.

SiOnyx is producing devices that represent the first and only known, low cost, highly scalable platform for hyper-spectral imaging. The SiOnyx implant is compatible with established semiconductor manufacturing processes and introduces no new material. The company’s patented process employs femtosecond laser processing of the target material resulting in an extremely thin (300nm) photoconduction layer applicable to both biased (detection) and photovoltaic (power generation) applications.

”Black silicon addresses the fundamental pain point in all photonics systems, the sensitivity to light,” said Stephen Saylor, president and CEO of SiOnyx, Inc. “By demonstrating that the black silicon process cost effectively scales within the established semiconductor device manufacturing infrastructure, SiOnyx is poised to transform the $10B+ light detection, imaging and photovoltaic markets by offering device manufactures a path to smaller, lighter and more efficient photonic systems.”

“Black silicon is a truly groundbreaking technology, and one that we are thrilled to have emanate from our lab at Harvard,” said Mazur. “With guidance and support from Harvard’s Office of Technology Development, we’ve been able to successfully put it on a path to commercialization – one that I am confident will lead to significant opportunity for the technology and SiOnyx.”

SiOnyx joins a growing list of Harvard spinouts, including Nano-Terra, SiEnergy, and Sirtris Pharmaceuticals. Since 2005, more than twenty companies have spun out of Harvard, several raising funding from leading venture capital firms including Alloy Ventures, Fidelity Biosciences, Flagship Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Novartis Bioventure Fund, Oxford Bioscience Partners and Polaris Venture Partners and more.

“The technical advances represented by black silicon and the exciting steps being taken to develop it for commercial application serve as even more evidence of the entrepreneurial energy that continues to gel and accelerate at Harvard,” said Isaac T. Kohlberg, Harvard University’s Senior Associate Provost and Chief Technology Development Officer. “The story of black silicon and SiOnyx is an excellent example of Harvard’s commitment to transfer promising, early-stage technology out of our research enterprise so it can be developed and utilized for the good of society.”

About Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development

The Harvard Office of Technology Development (OTD) is responsible for all activities pertaining to the evaluation, patenting and licensing of new inventions and discoveries made at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School. OTD also serves to further the development of Harvard technologies through the establishment of sponsored research collaborations with industry. OTD’s mission is to promote the public good by fostering innovation and translating new inventions made at Harvard into useful products available and beneficial to society.

But silicon would be more wondrous if it were even more responsive—if an incoming photon needed less energy to knock loose an electron, for example, or if a single photon could kick loose many electrons. In pursuit of this vision, chemists, physicists, and engineers have spent decades trying out various ways of modifying silicon crystals—for example, by doping them with atoms of arsenic or other elements that put more free electrons into the mix.

Almost ten years ago, graduate students in the laboratory of physics professor Eric Mazur at Harvard University stumbled across a new way of making silicon more responsive: they found that if they blasted the surface of a silicon wafer with an incredibly brief pulse of laser energy in the presence of gaseous sulfur and other dopants, the resulting material—which they called “black silicon”—was much better at absorbing photons and releasing electrons. And this week, after nearly three years in hyper-stealth mode, a spinoff company with an exclusive license from Harvard to commercialize the process has begun talking with reporters.

Executives for the company, called SiOnyx, believe that its technology will help semiconductor manufacturers build far more sensitive detectors and far more efficient photovoltaic cells, using essentially the same silicon-based processes they currently depend on—thereby revolutionizing areas such as medical imaging, digital photography, and solar energy generation.

The venture-funded startup has emerged with a bang, securing exclusive coverage by New York Times technology writer John Markoff in today’s edition. But SiOnyx CEO Stephen Saylor and principal scientist James Carey, a PhD graduate of Mazur’s lab, also showed me around their Beverly, MA, facility last week, on the condition that this post would appear after Markoff’s story.

SiOnyx principal scientist James Carey (L) and CEO Stephen Saylor (R)

“You’ve never been able to detect light the way this stuff detects light,” says Saylor, referring to black silicon’s remarkable sensitivity to incoming photons, especially photons at infrared energies, which pass through normal silicon as if it were transparent. That property could make it an ideal, and inexpensive, replacement for less-sensitive detectors in devices as varied as X-ray and CRT machines, surveillance satellites, night-vision goggles, and consumer digital cameras. “It means that you solve a clear and obvious pain point for a very large number of customers,” Saylor says.

And because black silicon is just silicon that’s been roughed up a bit by femtosecond laser pulses and chemical treatment, SiOnyx’s technology could theoretically be integrated into existing semiconductor fabrication lines without much disruption. “You can do everything we’re talking about without extraordinary, Herculean effort, and you can do it in a way that fits with high-volume manufacturing flows,” says Carey.

SiOnyx was incorporated in 2005, secured the Harvard license in early 2006, and obtained $11 million in venture financing from Harris & Harris, Polaris Venture Partners, and RedShift Ventures in 2007. The company is going public with its story because “we have enough momentum now both with strategic partners and with the technology that it makes sense at this point to share a little more about what we are up to,” say Saylor.

Harvard, for its part, is holding up SiOnyx as one early result of the ongoing overhaul of the university’s technology licensing efforts. The school gained a reputation early in this decade as being unresponsive, even hostile, toward faculty and students who wished to commercialize discoveries made in the university’s labs, especially in areas outside of biotechnology and drug development. For years after the discovery of black silicon in Mazur’s lab, the school’s technology transfer office “wasn’t very excited” about the work, according to Carey.

But in 2005 the university brought in university licensing veteran Isaac Kohlberg to rebuild its technology transfer operation from scratch. Saylor and Carey say it was Kohlberg and his staff who finally understood black silicon’s potential and ironed out the licensing deal that made SiOnyx possible.

“The exciting steps being taken to develop [black silicon] for commercial application serve as even more evidence of the entrepreneurial energy that continues to gel and accelerate at Harvard,” Kohlberg says in a press release set to be issued tomorrow by SiOnyx and Harvard’s Office of Technology Development.

Bob Metcalfe, a general partner at Polaris Ventures who sits on SiOnyx’s board, thinks Kohlberg is right: “Harvard seems to be getting its act together in patent licensing,” he says.

Exactly what makes black silicon such an effective absorber of photons is a question that even Mazur and Carey couldn’t answer at first. The material is one of many offshoots of work going on in Mazur’s lab in the late 1990s using femtosecond lasers—devices that can emit an intense pulse of light lasting only a millionth of a billionth of a second. Mazur lab researchers found that zapping a silicon wafer with such pulses in the presence of sulfur hexafluoride gas—an experiment initially carried out on a whim—left the wafer festooned with tiny cones. Silicon roughened in this way soaks up almost all of the light that strikes it in visible wavelengths, appearing black—hence the name.

“It took several years for us to begin thinking properly about what we had,” says Carey. “The original thought was that the surface roughening process was what created the advantage.” The researchers hypothesized that photons were bouncing from cone to cone—and that the more times they bounced, the higher the likelihood that they’d be absorbed, thus dislodging electrons. But then Carey and his coworkers realized that black silicon was also absorbing infrared light, “which you can’t explain just byroughening it.” It takes photons of a certain energy to bump electrons in silicon’s outermost layer of electrons, called the “valence band,” into the so-called “conduction band,” where they’re free to circulate between atoms—and infrared photons just don’t have enough. So by all rights, these photons should have been passing right through without interacting with the material, just as if it were frosted glass.

“That was the real discovery point,” says Carey. The genesis of SiOnyx, he explains, came when the Mazur lab dug into the changes caused by the femtosecond laser pulses at the atomic level. And as it turned out, he says, “the cones weren’t really paramount at all”—although they certainly look cool (electron micrographs of the cone forests, like the one below, still appear alongside almost any discussion of black silicon).

What’s really going on—though this is where Carey and Saylor start to get cagey, since it gets at the proprietary heart of SiOnyx’s technology—is that the laser pulses force unusually large numbers of dopant atoms into a thin layer of silicon on the surface of the cones. “The laser allows you to put in a million times more sulfur than you would normally get in if you just combined and heated them,” says Carey. “In that millionth of a billionth of a second you get structural arrangements frozen at the atomic level.”

Black silicon

With its new structure, the “band gap” in this thin silicon layer—the difference in energy between the valence band and the conduction band—is smaller. That means less energy is required to knock electrons into the conduction band, which explains why infrared photons can do the job. Another fringe benefit: applying a small voltage to black silicon (engineers call this “bias”) creates conditions in which a single incoming photon can knock loose dozens of electrons. So, not only is the material responsive to wavelengths that silicon-based devices simply couldn’t detect in the past—it also produces a much stronger signal in response to a weak stimulus. Black silicon is between 100 and 500 times more sensitive to light than untreated silicon, the company says.

These properties mean that SiOnyx is in a position to pioneer new types of solar cells that could capture the sun’s energy across a broader spectrum, achieving greater efficiency than today’s photovoltaic cells.
“Harnessing nuclear fusion energy arriving from Sol—solar energy at 1366 Watts per square meter—is the most promising technology for meeting accelerating world needs for cheap and clean energy,” says Polaris’s Metcalfe. Black silicon “promises to dramatically increase the photo-response (Amps per Watt) of silicon, and not just in the visible spectrum, but also in the infrared, where silicon currently misses half of Sol’s energy. Delivering on that promise is very exciting.”

But that’s the “long shot” application for the material, Metcalfe acknowledges. Closer in is the possibility of major sensitivity improvements in imaging applications such as night vision, surveillance, digital cameras, and medical imaging. Saylor says that the company has negotiated strategic partnerships with two “industry leaders,” and though he won’t name names, he says one of them is active in the medical imaging area.

The attraction of black silicon in medical imaging is obvious: If you could build a more sensitive detector for a CT or mammography machine, you could expose patients to a lower dose of X-rays. (Black silicon, of course, can’t detect X-rays directly; modern digital X-ray machines include a component called a scintillator that emits visible light when struck by X-rays, and that light is what’s recorded by a sensor.) “If we can do something that allows women to get risk-free mammograms twice a year or reduce the number of chest-X-ray equivalents that you get from a CT scan, or address other pain points, we will have an immediate path to market,” says Saylor.

While SiOnyx is telling some of its story, it’s keeping big pieces of it under wraps. Asked how many employees the company has, Saylor says it’s more than 10 and fewer than 50. (Significantly fewer, from what I could see around SiOnyx’s offices—a space in the former United Shoe Machinery factory in Beverly, far outside of Boston, that the company picked because the previous tenant had installed a clean room.) The company won’t build semiconductors or even semiconductor fabrication equipment, but will instead work with as-yet-unnamed partners to develop specifications for machines that can treat isolated areas of silicon wafers to create black silicon.

SiOnyx engineers were using an automated testing device to examine sections of such a wafer when I visited. “We are a process engineering company, not a product engineering company,” says Saylor. “Our job is to make a transferable process that conforms to [our partners'] manufacturing flow. We are doing a tremendous amount of development around what are the optimal conditions for making this black silicon—how do you do it uniformly, how do you make it massively scalable, and how do you transfer it to a foundry.”

Metcalfe says the biggest challenges before SiOnyx right now are “to move the black silicon process from labs to fabs, from experimental facilities/processes at Harvard to production facilities/processes at SiOnyx” and “to navigate through black silicon’s many opportunities to the right go-to-market products.”

Saylor says he hopes the company won’t have to raise any more venture capital to do that. “The first strategic relationships are going to be with very well-aligned industry leaders, so those will lead to development relationships and eventually product-revenue relationships,” he says. The company will be “careful with cash” until it can grow to the point that it “becomes interesting to someone outside the venture investing community,” he says.

There’s an interesting irony to SiOnyx’s business: a large chunk of the semiconductor industry’s effort over the past 50 years has gone toward making silicon as pure as possible. But now SiOnyx and other companies are showing how useful—and perhaps profitable—it can be to craft silicon devices with impurities, defects, and unconventional structures.

“We are messing up perfectly good silicon,” Carey admits. “But in the end, the properties speak for themselves.”

Read Full Article at Xconomy | Boston

James Carey, left, and Stephen Saylor of SiOnyx with black silicon wafers. Harvard plans to announce it has licensed patents for black silicon to the company.

On Monday, Harvard plans to announce that it has licensed patents for black silicon to SiOnyx, a company in Beverly, Mass., that has raised $11 million in venture financing.

This would never have happened if the physicist, Eric Mazur, and his graduate students had stuck to the original purpose of their research. He says their experience offers a lesson in government financing of science and technology, which is becoming so narrow and applied as to make discoveries like theirs much less likely.

A more narrow focus does have its advantages: for one, it can be more likely to produce an immediate payoff.

But in the current research environment, “you are less likely to be open to serendipity,” said Judith L. Estrin, an electrical engineer and author of “Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy” (McGraw-Hill, 2008).

Black silicon was discovered because Dr. Mazur started thinking outside the boundaries of the research he was doing in the late 1990s. His research group had been financed by the Army Research Organization to explore catalytic reactions on metallic surfaces.

“I got tired of metals and was worrying that my Army funding would dry up,” he said. “I wrote the new direction into a research proposal without thinking much about it — I just wrote it in; I don’t know why.” And even though there wasn’t an immediate practical application, he received the financing.

It was several years before he directed a graduate student to pursue his idea, which involved shining an exceptionally powerful laser light — briefly matching the energy produced by the sun falling on the surface of the entire earth — on a silicon wafer. On a hunch, the researcher also applied sulfur hexafluoride, a gas used by the semiconductor industry to make etchings for circuits.

The silicon wafer looked black to the naked eye. But when Dr. Mazur and his researchers examined the material with an electron microscope, they discovered that the surface was covered with a forest of ultra-tiny spikes.

At first, the researchers had no idea what they had stumbled onto, and that is typical of the way many scientific discoveries emerge. Cellophane, Teflon, Scotchgard and aspartame are among the many inventions that have emerged through some form of fortunate accident or intuition.

“In science, the most exciting expression isn’t ‘Eureka!’ It’s ‘Huh?’” said Michael Hawley, a computer scientist based in Cambridge, Mass., and a board member and investor in SiOnyx.

Black silicon has since been found to have extreme sensitivity to light. It is now on the verge of commercialization, most likely first in night vision systems.

“We have seen a 100 to 500 times increase in sensitivity to light compared to conventional silicon detectors,” said James Carey, a co-founder of SiOnyx who worked on the original experiments as a Harvard graduate student.

Dr. Mazur is an investor in SiOnyx and chairman of its scientific advisory board. As a result of his research, a number of academic and corporate research groups are still exploring the material, which absorbs about twice as much visible light as normal silicon and has the ability to detect infrared light that is invisible to the current generation of silicon detectors.

SiOnyx is already commercializing sensor-based chips as a technology development platform for other companies and for use in next-generation infrared imaging systems.

The new technology has a tremendous cost advantage in that it is compatible with current semiconductor manufacturing plants, according to Stephen Saylor, SiOnyx’s chief executive. It is certain to attract broad attention from a range of industries, including scientific and medical imaging markets.

In the future, the low cost and higher sensitivity of black silicon may also make it a contender in the multibillion-dollar digital camera and video markets, an area currently dominated by silicon and charge-coupled-device sensors.

SiOnyx is continuing to experiment with the photovoltaic properties of black silicon, but Mr. Saylor said the company had no plans to jump into the market to become a solar cell manufacturer. “Our engagement is going to be as a technology provider, not as a producer,” he said.

Instead, he is eager to get a new generation of a supersensitive light detectors into the hands of entrepreneurs and experimenters who will be able to take the technology in unpredictable directions.

AND that is how this technology got to where it is today. To Dr. Mazur, that should be a lesson to technology funding agencies like the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon.

“This is a very strong case in point for funding science for the advancement of science,” he said.

Read Full Article at The New York Times