Speaker 2
Well, very slick. And then the timeline is sort of advanced, you know, obviously we've seen in recent years, the last couple of decades, a huge adoption of solar. So yeah, what's that? What's been driving that?
Speaker 1
Well, that's something that I think is debated. I'll tell you one version of the story. Go ahead. I mean, I think let me back us back up to 1954 again, because there's, it turns out, you know, I've been working on this long overdue review paper for thin film photovoltaics, but you know, some in the same year, it turns out folks made the first thin film solar panels. No,
Speaker 2
that was in the 50s? Yeah, 1954. Same
Speaker 1
year. I thought that came way later. I know. You have to, yeah, you got to look interesting. Yeah, interesting. So, so what is the difference? So, you know, the original concept, you know, Bell Labs was working on these silicon solar panels, excuse me, solar cells, but they were also, everybody was starting to get excited about diodes and transistors, these other types of electronic components. But the way you make this is by growing a single crystal of silicon and then doing things to it, like diffusing in, not dopin, like we were talking about. Okay. The thin film device totally re-thinks that idea. So instead of having one perfect crystal, what if we took something super cheap, like glass, and then we coat onto it these semiconductors so we can make essentially like artificial rocks. And we don't need a very thick layer, right? Because the absorption happens over microns. Yeah, like something like a couple of microns is all you need in terms of what will absorb the light. And so folks started thinking about this and they're, you know, you look back in the history books of photovoltaics and it's sort of like, you know, a couple people working at not very well known universities playing around with this stuff. And, you know, there's a couple of people doing it for decades. That's right. And then finally, you know, 20, I don't know, 20, 2005, 2010, something like that. The world caught notice because the efficiencies of some of these thin film technologies, we're getting to be as high as what you can do from,
Speaker 2
from silicon-based technologies.
