Solaicx Lands 27m To Expand Production

Solaicx on Tuesday said it has received an additional $27.1 million in funding, giving the solar wafer developer the funds it needs to boost production.

Santa Clara, California-based Solaicx, a Red Herring North America 100 company for 2007, has developed a new process for making single-crystal silicon wafers—designed specifically for solar panels—more efficiently and cheaply.

“We’ve proven the technology,” said Solaicx CEO Bob Ford. “Now it boils down to actually doing it.”

Solaicx hopes to overcome a global shortage of silicon by making more solar wafers—the building blocks that are made into solar cells, which in turn get wired together to make solar panels—from less silicon. The company has developed technology to manufacture silicon wafers in a continuous process as opposed to in batches, increasing efficiency by up to 30 percent and lowering production costs...read more about Solaicx's product expansion