Manufacturing feasibility of high efficiency, miniaturised and customised Photovoltaic components for wearable and IoT applications

轻电已经开发并商业化了世界领先的效率光伏（PV）技术，该技术在收集能量方面比商用硅基光伏技术高出6倍。这种可再生能源可以使物联网克服与电池相关的浪费和维护成本的障碍，从而使其更具可扩展性和可持续性。近年来，Lightricity试图将其光伏组件和系统的制造转移到欧洲和英国，以解决离岸生产的一系列缺点，包括对定制的响应能力和供应中断。除了组装包装和测试步骤外，我们现在在欧洲和英国的所有制造阶段都有选择。有一些英国包装公司在相关的包装技术方面具有一般的能力，然而，由于对定制形状、小尺寸、厚度减少和坚固性的要求，他们认为将这些技术应用于我们的光伏产品存在很高的风险，因此每家公司都证明了这一点。这种无法弥合从半导体研究到实际商业批量生产的差距是一个可以解决的缺点。因此，该项目旨在解决将我们的光伏包装阶段转移到英国供应商的可行性，通过在Lightricity和选定的包装公司开展技术降低风险活动，并从我们与海外供应商合作的经验中转移知识。我们将特别关注与智能互连方法相结合的封装技术。通过支持这些公司克服风险障碍，我们将使他们能够扩大规模，实现成本效益和灵活的英国批量生产封装光伏，从而巩固全球机会，引领物联网的可扩展和可持续部署。

Lightricity has developed and commercialised world leading efficiency photovoltaic (PV) technology which is up to 6x better at harvesting energy than commercially available silicon-based PV. This renewable energy source can enable the IoT to overcome the barriers of battery-related waste and maintenance costs thus enabling it to be more scalable and sustainable.In recent years Lightricity have sought to migrate manufacturing of its PV component and system to Europe and the UK in order to address a range of shortcomings of offshore production including responsiveness for customisation and disruptions of supply. We have options for all stages of manufacture in Europe and the UK now other than the assembly packaging and test step. There are UK packaging houses that have general capabilities in the packaging techniques of relevance, however, each has proven uncomfortable with what they perceive to be a high level of risk in applying these techniques to our PV due to requirements for custom shapes, small sizes, thickness reduction and ruggedisation. This inability to bridge the gap from semiconductor research to actual commercial volume production is an addressable shortcoming.This project therefore aims to address the feasibility of transferring our PV packaging stage to UK suppliers by carrying out technical de-risking activities at Lightricity and with selected packaging houses and transferring knowledge from our experiences working with overseas suppliers. We will focus, in particular, on packaging techniques combined with smart interconnect methods. By supporting the companies to overcome the risk hurdles, we will enable them to scale up to cost effective and flexible UK volume manufacture of packaged PV which can then underpin global opportunities to lead the scalable and sustainable deployment of the IoT.