Nvidia is showing that even though it’s new to the radio silicon market, it’s keeping up with the technical prowess of the competition. The 150 Mbps benchmark is the most cutting edge LTE device currently available (in industry parlance it’s know as category 4 LTE), meaning the Tegra 4i can go head-to-head to with the superchips designed by Qualcomm, Broadcom and Altair Semiconductor.

Nvidia’s 150 Mbps demo at CTIA Wireless

But also like its competitors, Nvidia is been playing fast and loose with its marketing. It’s calling its modem “LTE-Advanced,” a benchmark no chipmaker in the industry is even close to matching. These chips are still 150 Mbps shy of meeting even the most minimal definition of LTE-Advanced. Nvidia and its peers are clearly abusing the term.

Nvidia has long made powerful applications and graphics processors for smartphones and tablets, but its momentum in the market has always been hampered by its lack of an integrated processor-modem. Integrated chips take up less space, draw less power and are generally cheaper, making it difficult for Nvidia to compete against mobile silicon giant Qualcomm in everything but the highest tier of the smartphone market.

Nvidia rectified the situation in 2011 by purchasing software defined wireless radio maker Icera. It gained an impressive modem to match its impressive multimedia processor, but it still needed to spend two years integrating the two into a single tight package. The Tegra 4i was the result.

When Nvidia first announced the chip back in February, however, it appeared that Nvidia was still having trouble keeping up with the competition. It’s processor was cutting edge, but the LTE modem was still an iteration behind – using category 3 LTE — making it a third slower than the other chips then hitting the market. Nvidia said it was able to rectify that quickly by utilizing Icera’s software defined radio architecture: it upgraded to category 4 with a simple firmware update.

Networks that support category 4 speeds don’t yet exist, though we could start seeing in them appear in the next year or two. That timing, though, works out well since Nvidia and other silicon vendors won’t have their superchips ready for commercial devices until late 2013 or early 2014. In the meantime, Nvidia is demoing Tegra 4i’s 150 Mbps throughput at CTIA over a simulated network, not a real one.

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While multiple 802.11ac devices and routers have recently hit the market, Quantenna is delving deeper into the 802.11ac standard, using multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) smart antennas to deliver four parallel streams of data over the same frequencies while aggregating both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi frequencies to create connections as fast as 2 Gbps.

The company already sells its 802.11n chips to router makers like Netgear, but the deal with STMicro could expose its technology to a broader range of devices beyond home and business wireless routers. STMicro sells processors and communications chips to the many industries including automotive, entertainment and security markets. Through its joint venture with Ericsson, it also makes integrated silicon for mobile handsets.

The focus on multi-gigabit Wi-Fi might seem a bit ridiculous given that the typical home broadband connection could never match such speeds, but there are plenty of signs that such high-capacity networks will be necessary. As home networks become more complex and sophisticated, smart TVs and entertainment hubs will be pushing big video files around the house, which will require workhorse local area networks.

And while gigabit broadband connections are only just emerging in the U.S. households, public Wi-Fi hotspots using high-speed backhaul links are gaining popularity among carriers, municipalities and other service providers. Such shared public connections could allow hundreds of people to access the same Wi-Fi nodes, taking the data load off cellular networks.

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So why does Graphene Technologies CEO John Myers sound so downbeat about the atom-thick carbon lattice?

Speaking at Graphene Live in Berlin — co-located with the Printed Electronics Europe 2013 event — Myers pretty much asked the crowd of attendees whether any of them had any idea what to do with the stuff:

“I’m skeptical about the market I’m in now. There’s a lot of enthusiasm, but also a lot of confusion. The problem is there isn’t a market of any significant size for graphene.

“We all do ourselves a disservice with our inarticulate, self-congratulatory posturing. The fact is there isn’t a killer app yet and there’s no reason to think there will be, except there’s a lot of [effort] and money being thrown at it, and the material does appear to have a lot of potential.”

That potential is a big reason for the hype around graphene (which, we should bear in mind, was only manufactured for the first time less than a decade ago). Because of graphene’s properties, many see it as a possible successor to silicon — a material whose own computing-friendly properties will break down if we miniaturize it much more than we already do.

The problem there is that graphene doesn’t have an intrinsic band gap, making it tricky to use in transistors — simply put, you can’t turn a pure graphene transistor off. This may yet be fixed through clever doping (coating) techniques, but we still don’t know for sure whether that can be done while retaining graphene’s advantages.

What about touchscreens? Graphene is transparent and highly conductive, so in that regard it could be a great rival to the frequently-used indium-tin-oxide (ITO) as a conductive coating – and it’s more flexible, too. However, as IDTechEx analyst Khasha Ghaffarzadeh pointed out, graphene doesn’t significantly outperform ITO. It also has serious rivals on the flexibility front, chiefly from carbon nanotubes. Then there’s the fact that while there are concerns over the future supply of indium, an ever-increasing amount of the rare metal is being retrieved through recycling.

Graphene is also touted as a replacement for activated carbon in the electrodes of supercapacitors, which are used in electric car batteries, for example. But, Ghaffarzadeh said, “it is again trying to replace a material that is well-known and low-cost.” And as a replacement for graphite (the source of graphene, of course) in carbon fiber? Ditto. How about for use in conductive inks? Again, carbon pastes are the rival, and they’re pretty cheap too.

As Ghaffarzadeh said:

“The potential is enormous, but it’s trying to do things that already exist, only a little bit better and a bit cheaper. We need new concepts that graphene alone is enabling: new platforms.”

Myers noted that we are “more than likely going to end up with a range of carbon nano-products, each of which will have a range of interesting features and uses.” Regarding graphene, he added that he hates competing on price, and doesn’t want to “go into a market where the value proposition is that I’m cheaper than the other guy.”

“I would urge everyone in the field to think about the process opportunity,” Myers said. “There’s no practical limit to the amount of this material that can be made. That means that, in the bulk world, graphene is going to be a commodity. As a business, you have to think about what kind of value you can create with the material, because you’re not going to make any money producing it.”

To that end, he added, Graphene Technologies has joined the brand new Graphene Stakeholders Association, which opened its doors on Thursday. There, he suggested, various players in the nascent scene can educate each other and collaborate.

And, hopefully, find the killer app for this wondrous substance.

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Welcome to the curse of the automotive industry: the lead time on new car designs and manufacturing schedules mean that the technology you’re buying today was developed years earlier. What’s more, that technology effectively becomes locked down in your vehicle. As soon as your drive off the lot the connected car system you have is the one you’re stuck with for years. (For more details on the connected car technology check out our infographic.)

Mobile processor maker Nvidia, however, is proposing a solution to that problem: why not make an upgradable connected car system. We “upgrade” our smartphones and tablets every year or two by buying completely new devices, but that’s not really an option for an automobile.

However, with processors based on its Tegra designs, Nvidia wants to empower automakers to build cars that not only have top-of-the-line computing components when they roll off the lot but also can be upgraded periodically during their long lives.

In short, Nvidia wants to help automakers make connected cars that never become obsolete.

Meet Jetson

According to Nvidia Director of Automotive Danny Shapiro, the company designed its automotive processors, called Visual Computing Modules, around a flexible framework that allows automakers to work future processor technology into what are typically three-year long development cycles. Rather than design a connected car system years away from production using today’s chips, engineers can design tomorrow’s cars using tomorrow’s chips, Shapiro said.

Tesla Model S

That program is already seeing some pretty significant results, Shapiro said. Within a month of shipping in Google’s flagship tablet, the Nexus 7, the Tegra 3 debuted in the Tesla Model S, powering its impressive infotainment system (along with a separate Tegra 2 processor to handle the instrument cluster).

That solves the first problem – making an infotainment system that’s not obsolete before it hits the show floor. Solving the next problem — making a connected car system that keeps up with the pace of consumer electronics innovation — is much trickier.

To tackle it, Nvidia recently launched a new automotive architecture called Jetson, which tries to solve more than just the problem of obsolescence. First, Jetson is powerful, incorporating Nvidia’s pixel-crunching graphics processing units alongside its Tegra VCM chips. Nvidia is hoping that its silicon won’t just be the brains of your infotainment system but an extra set of eyes on the road.

Danny Shapiro

Nvidia wants to power the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) emerging in the next-generation of cars, Shapiro said. Moving beyond adaptive cruise control and proximity detection, cars will eventually sport omnidirectional cameras that will “see” the road in all directions and possibly even scanning lasers that can model a vehicle’s surrounding in 3D. The art of processing image and spatial data just happens to be Nvidia’s sweet spot.

In addition, Nvidia has crafted Jetson to be a development platform that builds on its earlier work with its VCM chips. “Automakers can simulate future designs,” Shapiro said. “They can get their development done now, preparing for the next-generation chips and next-generation car apps.”

Finally, Jetson is modular. The core processing unit is designed to be swappable. That means an automaker can easily incorporate the latest and greatest version of Jetson into their existing connected car and infotainment systems each successive years. It also means, Shapiro said, that one day we could upgrade our car’s dashboard computers much like we’d upgrade an old PC.

Pimp my ride’s CPU

Unless you’re one of those folks that can afford to buy a new car every time the ashtrays get full, chances are any new vehicle purchase is going to be a long-term investment. Six years is not an unreasonable time to spend driving the same car, but that’s an eternity in the world of consumer electronics. Six years ago, what we now think of as a smartphone didn’t exist, and no one had yet developed many technologies we now take for granted such as speech-powered virtual assistants, 3D mapping and location-based social networks.

Many automakers have decided that trying to keeping up with the day-to-day advances of that technology is an exercise in futility and have built their connected car strategies around the smartphone itself. Ford and Chevy, for instance have designed their connected infotainment systems as extensions of the driver’s handset. So as the smartphone becomes more powerful, so do their cars’ dashboards.

An upgradable CPU would solve part of that problem, but not the whole problem. It doesn’t matter if your new car dash computer can process hi-rez images in real time if it doesn’t have the sensors to collect those images.

But the auto industry is trying to solve that problem as well. Ford has launched an open-source hardware program called OpenXC, which could let us upgrade components like heads up displays and sensor arrays in our future cars.

I’m not saying you’ll be able to turn your old jalopy into KITT from Knight Rider, but who knows? One day maybe we could customize our cars so they behave like new even if they don’t look like new.

Mouse car image courtesy of Shutterstock user Mopic

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Qualcomm’s baseband chips and integrated applications processors have long supported all cellular technologies and bands, but they’ve never been able to produce a truely global phone. That’s because the other hardware components of the phone have never supported the same breadth of frequencies. Consequently, LTE devices have always been region-specific. Even Apple had to can its usual of strategy of producing a single global device and design three different variants of the iPhone 5.

Wireless Intelligence projects 38 distinct LTE bands in 2015

But Qualcomm’s new front-end chip, called the RF360, can supposedly support up to 40 LTE bands, both the time division and frequency division variants of LTE and all legacy 3G and 2G technologies to boot. Qualcomm created a 3D chip that utilizes a separate sophisticated antenna tuner that can latch onto any of 40 LTE frequencies between 600 MHz and 2.7 GHz – pretty much the entire range of current 4G spectrum.

This technology will be a key element in creating the future universal LTE phone, but — before you get too excited — it’s not the only necessary element. Other components in the RF chain such as the antenna will need to catch up before a device could feasibly work on every LTE network in the world. Smart antenna makers like SkyCross and Ethertronics have designed antennas that can support a dozen bands or so, but they’re not quite ready for 40.

But Qualcomm EVP and co-president of mobile and computing technologies Murthy Renduchintala said that the RF360 would allow device makers to make far fewer variants of their phones. In order to cover all of the world’s LTE networks, a vendor is faced with the prospect of designing as many as 10 different devices. The capabilities of RF360 could cut that number down to as few as three, he said.

“There will always be more problems to solve,” Renduchintala said an interview with GigaOM. “What we’ve done here is remove one of the most enormous obstacles.”

One of the problems this technology could overcome is the 4G fragmentation problem that’s already emerging in the U.S. All four of major operators are deploying LTE on different frequencies, while the rural and many regional operators are off on their lonesome in a neglected portion of the 700 MHz band. Clearwire isn’t just launching LTE on it’s own 2.5 GHz band, it’s the only U.S. carrier using TD-LTE. Maybe the RF360 can’t yet produce a global 4G phone, but it could produce a universal phone for the U.S. — and maybe ensure that smaller operators aren’t left out of the 4G revolution.

Also, Apple could conceivably use the technology to combine all of its iPhone 5 variants into a single device, but it still wouldn’t have a universal iPhone. Apple’s three iPhone models still leave out a good deal of the world’s current LTE frequencies, and with current technology it couldn’t cram 30 or 40 bands into a single device.

But wait, there’s more! Qualcomm has also introduced its own envelope tracking technology into the module, which will help sate LTE device’s notorious hunger for power. Envelope tracking helps control the enormous energy spikes inherent in LTE, reducing device power consumption by as much as 30 percent. Other silicon vendors like Broadcom and Altair Semiconductor have announced support for envelope tracking in their new super-chips, but support doesn’t necessarily equate inclusion. Qualcomm developed its technology in-house and is embedding envelope trackers directly into its future RF products.

Renduchintala said the module has already begun sampling and is in the hands of phone manufacturers. The first commercial devices with the new capabilities should start appearing in the latter half of the year.

This post was updated at 12:05 PM, Thursday, with new information on the implications of the technology for the iPhone.

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As I wrote earlier this week, LTE-Advanced is a much-abused term, used increasingly throughout the industry to make LTE products seem much more significant than they actually are. Carriers and vendors have latched onto a single technique in LTE-Advanced standard to justify their use of the moniker.

Altair is no exception, though to be fair its new super-chips are more advanced that others. It’s incorporated into its designs two techniques from the LTE-Advanced standard: carrier aggregation, which bonds together disparate swathes of spectrum into one big super-carrier, and enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC), which will allow small cells and big macrocells to coexist in the same airwaves.

What’s more, Altair co-founder and marketing VP Eran Eshed said that whatever LTE-Advanced techniques its chips don’t support today will be supported in the future through software upgrades. “In contrast to competitive solutions, Altair’s solution is based on a very advanced and powerful SDR (Software Defined Radio) architecture which means that we have the ability to deploy a chipset and upgrade its features as standards evolve,” Eshed told me via email.

Perhaps the most notable detail in Altair’s new chip specs, though, is its use of envelope tracking. It’s an obscure little technology being developed by companies like Nujira and Quantance, but envelope tracking has the potential to significantly boost 4G-device battery life by tempering LTE’s innate power hunger. Eshed wouldn’t tell me whose envelope tracking technology Altair is using, but this is the first implementation of the technology I’ve seen in a chipset.

Correction: I was wrong about Altair being the first to support envelope tracking. Broadcom’s new LTE chip, announced last week, also supports the new technology.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user alphaspirit

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The TV white spaces are the unused airwaves lying between TV channels, and governments around the world have proposed using those frequencies to develop a type of “Super Wi-Fi” – basically combining Wi-Fi’s unlicensed, free-to-access model with the much longer reach of these low-frequency TV airwaves.

In the U.S., regulators and the technology’s boosters want to use TV white spaces to expand the availability of cheap broadband, though the issue has become a political hot potato in the upcoming TV spectrum incentive auction. Microsoft is working with African regulators and ISPs to experiment with whites spaces broadband access in Kenya.

In the U.K., though, regulators are earmarking the spectrum as a means to ease the burdens of traditional cellular data networks — using unlicensed airwaves to offload 3G and 4G traffic. British entrepreneurs have interpreted that offload concept as making white spaces ideal for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, the long-range wireless grid concept for linking together the internet of things. In Cambridge, Neul has begun testing smart grids and other sensor networks in a citywide trial. Neul has drawn in other U.K. heavyweights, including ARM, CSR and Cable & Wireless, all of which joined the Weightless SIG.

Neul and Weightless said the new chipset can tap the entire range of UHF frequencies from 470 MHz to 790 MHz, which means it could be used in countries beyond the U.K. (The location of white spaces differ from country to country and even city to city, depending on which frequencies local TV stations use). However, they didn’t reveal which partners were taking possession of its samples, so we’ll have to wait to see which hardware makers are interested in the fledgling standard.

Feature image courtesy of Cillian Storm.

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Look ma, I shrunk the light beams: Waveguides are hollow tubes that help channel (light) waves and typically the width of the waveguide needs to be similar in magnitude to the wavelength of the guided wave. This has imposed limitations on the size of the optical devices. Now Caltech researchers, co-led by assistant professor of electrical engineering Hyuck Choo, have figured out a way to get around this natural limit. They’ve come up with a way to make light beams smaller and smaller by developing a new kind of waveguide device that can focus light to a few nanometers. What that means is that we can create even smaller optical components, which in turn can be used inside networking gear, data center equipment and even inside imaging devices. It also mean we can use current optical fibers to cram even more data inside them.

The waveguide device is made of amorphous silicon dioxide (much like common glass) and is covered in a thin layer of gold. As light passes through the device, photons interact with electrons at the interface between gold and silicon dioxide. The electrons oscillate and those oscillations propagate along as waves, carrying the same information as the light waves. The new device is built using traditional chip making technologies, thus making it easier to produce and bring to the market.

Move over Silicon, make way for new chip materials. Silicon might be the building block of our digital life, but researchers at MIT believe that it is time to pay attention to new materials. They have come up with what they describe as the smallest indium gallium arsenide transistor, which is 22 nanometers (a billionth of a meter) in length.

Indium gallium arsenide has already found use in fiber-optic communications and radar technologies, but the new small size transistor is aimed at computing devices and replacing silicon, according to Jesús del Alamo, the Donner Professor of Science in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), who co-developed it with EECS graduate student Jianqian Lin and Dimitri Antoniadis, the Ray and Maria Stata Professor of Electrical Engineering.

Why is this important? Well, MIT researchers argue that the since silicon transistors are getting harder and harder to shrink, the amount of current that can be produced by the devices is also shrinking, limiting their speed of operation. So, in order for Moore’s Law to go on, del Alamo points out that alternatives to silicon are needed. By building a tiny transistor using Indium Gallium Arsenide, they claim to have a viable contender.

Optics & Silicon get hitched: This marriage of optical and silicon is an area of immense focus, and IBM is spearheading the movement. IBM has come up with new chips that combine traditional silicon based electronic parts with optical components that will lead to much faster and beefier networks.  Stacey has all the details.

[Bonus link] Fibers secured: Toshiba and Cambridge University scientists have come up with a way to boost the security of data over fiber optic cables, the New York Times reports. The fiber optic networks are prone to eavesdropping, but these researchers have come up with ways to make the networks more secure. Read more at the New York Times’ website.

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The Qualcomm Snapdragon line does have some advantages over its competitors, though — some technical and some logistical. Let’s start with the technical:

Unlike most ARM-based processor makers, Qualcomm doesn’t license the ARM Cortex architecture directly. Instead a pays a licensing fee to build its own ARM-compatible processors. That gives Qualcomm a great deal of flexibility to tweak its designs, and it’s evident in newest processor architecture, called Krait.

Qualcomm’s newest chips don’t just have four cores; each will have independently variable clock speeds. When a phone requires little processing power, such as when it’s sleeping, only one core will be active. But as processing needs increase the remaining cores start kicking in, drawing more battery power. Snapdragon’s design allows the processor to gradually ramp up clock speed on each core, so different cores perform different tasks but only draw the power needed for each task.

Qualcomm has added plenty of other technology bells and whistles as well, from stereoscopic camera support to its own Adreno graphics processors.

But Snapdragon’s biggest advantage is the position Qualcomm has carved for itself in the handset silicon market. It’s not only the largest maker of applications processors; it also rules the radio chip universe. And it hasn’t been shy about using its dominance in the latter to reinforce its lead in the processor market.

Qualcomm is the only major chipmaker so far that’s managed to ship an integrated LTE radio and processor chipset, which puts it at a huge advantage when it comes to providing the silicon for the next generation of smartphones. Using an integrated chipset saves not only space and design efforts, but also power when slotted into a device. And power efficiency is the new Holy Grail in mobile, as LTE radios, larger screens and workhorse processors all make their demands on the battery.

A phone maker may really like Nvidia’s Tegra stand-alone processors, but Qualcomm’s integrated chipsets might appear sweeter because of those power and design considerations. Until Nvidia integrates its processors with its Icera radio chipsets in 2013, it will be at disadvantage to Qualcomm.

Ironically, Qualcomm hasn’t shipped an integrated quad-core chip yet. The APQ8064 chip in the LG Optimus G is a stand-alone processor. That fact might seem to even the playing field, but Qualcomm also takes advantage of its might in LTE to ensure its radio chips don’t necessarily play nice with other manufacturers’ silicon.

It’s no coincidence that highly hyped new smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S III and HTC One X debuted in foreign markets as quad-core devices but appeared in the US as LTE handsets with dual-core Snapdragon processors. When it comes to LTE here in the US, handset vendors still have to answer to Qualcomm – at least for now.

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Bsolar showed off its solar cells at a German trade show last month and announced a 730KW project in Japan that will use its new cells. The venture-backed company, founded in 2007, is bringing its solar tech to the market for the first time, and its cells could produce over 20 percent more electricity compared to conventional, single-sided cells, according to Yossi Kofman, co-founder and CEO of bSolar.

Bifacial solar cell research has been around for about four decades, but bifacial cells are still more of a novelty product today. Bringing the tech to market successfully requires overcoming technical challenges, including finding ways to produce bifacial cells cheaply. The technology may be attracting more attention these days as conventional silicon solar cells become low-price commodities and manufacturers scramble to boost their products’ performances to gain a competitive edge. “Everyone is looking for high-power and differentiated products, and that’s what we are providing,” Kofman said.

BSolar took silicon wafers and engineered into them the ability to capture reflected light on both sides. That means the cells’ backside can absorb light and contain electrodes to ferry the electricity produced out of the cells. The use of boron is a key to making bifacial cells, and a lot of research has been done by both companies and universities to investigate this chemical.

Nothing boron about it

What makes boron a good candidate is not just that it makes the rear side of a solar cell more receptive to light. It also promises to be a good alternative to aluminum, which historically has been used to minimize the loss of electrons during the energy production process. But aluminum, when interacting with silicon, can create enough stress to bow or break silicon wafers, particularly with the use of thinner silicon wafers. As solar companies look at using thinner silicon wafers to reduce costs, they also are considering using boron to replace aluminum to reduce breakage. Using boron also improves the efficiency of the front side of the cells to convert sunlight into energy, Kofman said.

But boron doesn’t make an easy substitute, or else bifacial cells would have become widely available by now. Getting the boron layer right during solar cell production is difficult, Kofman noted.

A solar panel with bifacial cells requires different designs than traditional solar panels. For example, a conventional silicon solar panel is covered in layers of polymer materials to protect solar cells and a piece of glass as the top cover to let the light in. The same or similar setup will have to need to be created to cover the backside of the panel, said Bhushan Sopori, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

“The technologies are there. The big question is the additional costs of doing it – how much reflected light can be harvested and do the benefits justify the cost?” Sopori pointed out.

Companies that have been working on bifacial cells include Sanyo (now part of Panasonic) in Japan and Shinsung in Korea. Sanyo’s cells are silicon wrapped with amorphous-silicon layers, and the design is very different than what bSolar and others are creating.

BSolar is making bifacial solar cells with monocrystalline silicon wafers, which are harder and more expensive to make, but they also can convert a higher rate of sunlight into electricity than the more popular multicrystalline silicon. Solar panels with bSolar’s bifacial cells could produce 20-25 percent more energy than single-sided solar panels when they are installed on a flat rooftop, the ideal setting for getting the most reflected light, Kofman said.

The startup has a 30MW factory in Germany that it acquired from Systaic during a bankruptcy proceeding, said Kofman, who declined to disclose the company’s production cost. BSolar has only raised $10 million in venture capital since its inception, including $3 million from Genesis Partners and some investors from Japan, Kofman said. That $10 million is awfully low to bring a technology into commercial production, even though bSolar is using mostly standard factory equipment. Kofman wouldn’t say whether the company used any part of the $10 million to buy the German factory.

Solar panel makers who have agreed to give bSolar’s cells a shot include Aleo Solar, Asola Solarpower and Solar-Fabrik.

Photos courtesy of bSolar

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