Chemical beam epitaxy for photovoltaics and GaN-based electronics

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With the impending environmental and energy crises, industries such as high efficiency solar cells and electrically powered vehicles are poised for sustained, spectacular growth for the near future. Yole developement is predicting strong market growth for power devices to a level of 20 billion dollars by 2020. Likewise, in a comprehensive report, Greenpeace is predicting that concentrated solar cells will supply about 25% of the world's energy by 2050. However, the biggest limiting factor for these markets is the production cost of their respective technologies. A significant part of the production costs is dedicated to the basic material fabrication by a technique called epitaxy, by which very high quality thin films are deposited on a crystalline substrate. The production costs can be decreased significantly if a cheap substrate material is used. Silicon is the best candidate for such a purpose. Several methods to that end have been proposed in recent years, but none is combining low production cost with effective residual thermal stress relaxation.