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Nanopillar Solar Cells

A new solar-cell design could cut costs and is suitable for large-scale flexible panels.
By Prachi Patel

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have made a new kind of solar cell by growing an array of upright nanoscale pillars on aluminum foil. They make bendable solar cells by encapsulating the entire cell inside a transparent, rubbery polymer. The design, the researchers suggest, could lead to solar cells that cost less than conventional silicon photovoltaics.

Cheap solar: A new solar cell is composed of an array of erect cadmium sulfide nanopillars (bottom) embedded inside a matrix of cadmium telluride. The entire cell, fabricated on thin aluminum foil, becomes bendable when encased in polymer. Credit: Ali Javey, UC Berkeley

The nanopillars allow the researchers to use cheaper, lower-quality materials than those used in conventional silicon and thin-film technologies. What's more, the technique used to make the cells could be adapted to make rolls of flexible panels on thin aluminum foil, cutting manufacturing costs, says Ali Javey, an electrical-engineering and computer-sciences professor who led the work. The work is at an early stage, and "you won't know the cost until you do this using a roll-to-roll process," he says. "But if you can do it, the cost could be 10 times less than what's used to make [crystalline] silicon panels."

The solar cells are made of uniform 500-nanometer-high pillars of cadmium sulfide embedded in a thin film of cadmium telluride. Both materials are semiconductors used in thin-film solar cells. In an online Nature Materials paper, Javey and his colleagues showed that the cells have an efficiency of about 6 percent in transforming sunlight into electricity. Others have made cells with pillar designs, he says, but they used expensive methods to grow the pillars and could not get efficiencies above 2 percent.

In conventional cells, silicon absorbs light and creates free electrons, which need to get to the electrical circuit before they get trapped at defects or impurities in the material. This requires extremely pure, expensive crystalline silicon to achieve the most efficient photovoltaic devices.

The nanopillar design splits up silicon's duties: the material surrounding the pillars absorbs light, and the pillars transport them to the electrical circuit. This increases efficiency in two ways. The closely packed pillars trap light between them, helping the surrounding material absorb more. The electrons also have a very short distance to travel through the pillars, so there are fewer chances of their getting trapped at defects. That means you can use low-quality, less expensive materials, Javey says.

Others are making solar cells with different nanostructures. Harvard University chemistry professor Charles Lieber has made nanowires consisting of a silicon core and different concentric silicon layers. Peidong Yang, a chemistry professor at UC Berkeley, has made dye-sensitized solar cells with zinc oxide nanowires. These nanowire solar cells have reached efficiencies of 4 percent.

Javey and his colleagues make the nanopillar cell by first anodizing aluminum foil. This creates a periodic arrangement of 200-nanometer-wide pores, which act as templates for cadmium sulfide crystals to grow erect. Then comes a coating of cadmium telluride and the top electrode, a copper and gold film. They attach the cell to a glass plate or make it flexible by pouring polymer solution on top and setting it.

"This is exciting progress in integrating engineered nanomaterials with a diversity of soft substrates for fabricating flexible and foldable high-efficiency solar cells," says Zhong Lin Wang, a materials-science and engineering professor at Georgia Tech. But the cell will have to compete with thin-film flexible solar cells made of silicon, cadmium telluride, and other materials, says Arthur Nozik, a physical chemist who studies nano solar cells at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, CO. As opposed to the new cell's flexibility, he says, "I think the selling point might be low cost."

For now, the researchers are exploring materials that could improve the cell efficiency. The top copper-gold layer, for instance, is only 50 percent transparent. If all the light falling on it went through, the cell's efficiency could already be double, Javey says. The researchers plan to make cells with transparent conducting materials such as indium oxide. "There is significant room for improvement, at least by two times, by simply improving or replacing our top contact material," he says.

The researchers also intend to try other semiconductor materials for the pillars and surrounding material. Javey says that the fabrication process is compatible with a wide range of semiconductors, and other combinations could up the efficiency.

Trying other semiconductor materials might also be important given cadmium's toxicity issues, Berkeley's Yang points out. Nevertheless, he says, "architecture is most important--materials we can continue working on. The beauty of this paper is the demonstration of how well the architecture works."

Culture Shock: The Web Generation Meets Corporate America

By Martha Irvine
AP
07/18/09 4:00 AM PT
Many recent college graduates have grown accustomed to working and playing with a notebook or smartphone in-hand. This always-connected way of living sometimes doesn't mesh with the corporate policies those grads might find upon landing their first job. Companies might better harness their younger employees' talents by reconsidering the restrictions they place on certain office technologies.

Ryan Tracy thought he'd entered the Dark Ages when he graduated college and arrived in the working world.

His employer blocked access to Facebook , Gmail and other popular Internet sites. He had no wireless access for his laptop and often ran to a nearby cafe on work time so he could use its WiFi connection to send large files.

Sure, the barriers did what his employer intended: They stopped him and his colleagues from using work time to goof around online. However, Tracy says the rules also got in the way of legitimate work he needed to do as a scientific analyst for a health care services company.

"It was a constant battle between the people that saw technology as an advantage, and those that saw it as a hindrance," says the 27-year-old Chicagoan, who now works for a different company.

Massive Multiplexity

He was sure there had to be a better way. It's a common complaint from young people who join the work force with the expectation that their bosses will embrace technology as much as they do. Then some discover that sites they're supposed to be researching for work are blocked. Or they can't take a little down time to read a news story online or check their personal e-mail or social networking accounts. In some cases, they end up using their own Internet-enabled smartphones to get to blocked sites, either for work or fun.

So some are wondering: Could companies take a different approach, without compromising security or workplace efficiency, that allows at least some of the online access that younger employees particularly crave?

"It's no different than spending too much time around the water cooler or making too many personal phone calls. Do you take those away? No," says Gary Rudman, president of GTR Consulting, a market research firm that tracks the habits of young people. "These two worlds will continue to collide until there's a mutual understanding that performance, not Internet usage, is what really matters."

This is, after all, a generation of young people known for what University of Toronto sociologist Barry Wellman calls "media multiplexity." College students he has studied tell him how they sleep with their smartphones and, in some cases, consider their gadgets to be like a part of their bodies. They're also less likely to fit the traditional 9-to-5 work mode and are willing to put in time after hours in exchange for flexibility, including online time.

So, Wellman and others argue, why not embrace that working style when possible, rather than fight it?

Opening the Gates

There is, of course, another side of the story -- from employers who worry about everything from wasted time on the Internet to confidentiality breaches and liability for what their employees do online. Such concerns have to be taken especially seriously in such highly regulated fields as finance and healthcare , says Nancy Flynn, a corporate consultant who heads the Ohio-based ePolicy Institute.

From a survey Flynn did this year with the American Management Association, she believes nearly half of U.S. employers have a policy banning visits to personal social networking or video sharing sites during work hours. Many also ban personal text messaging during working days.

Flynn notes that the rising popularity of BlackBerrys, iPhones and other devices with Web access and messaging have made it much trickier to enforce what's being done on work time, particularly on an employee's personal phone. Or often the staff uses unapproved software applications to bypass the blocks.

As a result, more employers are experimenting with opening access.

That's what Joe Dwyer decided to do when he started Chicago-based Brill Street & Co., a jobs site for young professionals. He lets his employees use social networking and has found that, while they might spend time chatting up their friends, sometimes they're asking those same friends for advice for a work problem or looking for useful contacts.

"So what seems unproductive can be very productive," Dwyer says.

Kraft (NYSE: KFT) Foods recently opened access to everything from YouTube to Facebook and Hotmail, with the caveat that personal use be reasonable and never interfere with job activities.

Abusing the Privilege

Broadening access does, of course, mean some employees will cross lines they aren't supposed to.

Sapphire Technologies, an information-technology staffing firm based in Massachusetts, started allowing employees to use most Internet sites two years ago, because recruiters for the company were going on Facebook to find talent.

Martin Perry, the company's chief information officer, says managers occasionally have to give employees a "slap on the wrist" for watching sports on streaming video or downloading movies on iTunes. He says older managers sometimes raise eyebrows at their younger counterparts' online judgment.

"If you saw some of the pictures that they've uploaded, even to our internal directory, you'd question the maturity," Perry says.

It's the price a company has to pay, he says, for attracting top young talent that's willing to work at any hour. "Banning the Internet during work hours would be myopic on our part," Perry says.

'An Awkward Hug'

However, that also means many companies are still figuring out their online policies and how to deal with the blurring lines between work and personal time -- including social networking, even with the boss.

"I think over time, an open embrace of these tools can become like an awkward hug," says Mary Madden, a senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "It can get very messy."

One option is for companies to allow access to certain sites but limit what employees can do there. For instance, Palo Alto Networks, a computer security company, recently helped a pharmaceutical company and a furniture maker open up social networking for some employees, but limited such options as file-sharing, largely so that sensitive information isn't transferred, even accidentally.

"Wide-open Internet access is the risky approach," says Chris King, Palo Alto Networks' director of product marketing. However, "fully closed is increasingly untenable for cultural reasons and business reasons."

Flynn, at the ePolicy Institute, says it's important that employers have a clear online policy and then explain it. She believes not enough employers have conducted formal training on such matters as online liability and confidentiality.

Meantime, her advice to any employee is this: "Don't start blogging. Don't start tweeting. Don't even start e-mailing until you read the company policy.

Cyberattack Defense: Staying One Step Ahead of Hackers

By Mike Dager
TechNewsWorld
07/16/09 4:00 AM PT
It's not enough to build a high wall around your systems. Hackers will eventually figure out a way to breach it, and then everything inside will be vulnerable to attack. With the rapid changes in today's Web-based environment, it's essential to move beyond passive techniques and build security into critical systems.

Describing cyberterrorism as a "weapon of mass disruption," President Barack Obama released in late May the findings of a 60-day cybersecurity review. The statistics told the ugly story: Last year alone, cybercriminals stole intellectual property from businesses worldwide worth up to US$1 trillion. In the past two years alone, cybercrime has cost Americans more than $8 billion.

Hackers continue to develop sophisticated measures that utilize the Web to tamper with, infect or pirate mission-critical applications in both the private and public sectors. Emerging Web-based technologies such as cloud computing have heightened the awareness among organizations of the need for security measures to protect their valuable data assets and IP.

The industry needs software protection technology that hardens applications against attempted attacks such as reverse-engineering for IP theft or malware insertion, which can degrade the 100 percent integrity requirement of mission-critical applications.

The New Security Perimeter

Traditionally, software has either not been protected or protected only through passive techniques such as obfuscation and encryption. The problem is that these passive techniques alone fall short of providing the security needed in today's threat world. They provide a static one-time hurdle that hackers can quickly dispose of, and the protected application has no further recourse when that single defense layer is breached.

Today's Web-based environment opens new markets and opportunities, but it also enables rapid distribution of malware and compromised software. Attack tools are quickly developed and disseminated, making zero-day attacks commonplace. Companies are increasingly selling globally, with more and more business conducted electronically, placing transactions and software alike at risk.

While traditional security thinking has led many toward a focus on securing the perimeter -- such as the perimeter of the network, application or system, this approach is insufficient in today's world of distributed computing. This focus has diverted resources and attention from the real task at hand -- building defensibility into applications -- and it leaves everything inside the perimeter vulnerable to attack.

In short, enterprises deploying widely used data protection methods aimed at "defending the perimeter," are not adequate in today's distributed computing world to safeguard intellectual property, and companies must learn to adopt new strategies aimed at integrating security into the software and data assets themselves.

Seven Key Requirements for Software Protection

Successful IP protection requires several criteria to safeguard software from a multitude of threats. Among these are diversity and layers of defense, which are critical to ensuring that the protected application is not vulnerable once deployed in the market. Also critical is an intelligence component that provides real-time alerts regarding any attempts to compromise a system. The protection solution should include these elements without development overhead or heavy runtime penalty.

1. Durable. Security solutions protect by authenticating users, determining user privileges, or verifying transactions. Seasoned hackers are skilled at identifying and circumventing yes-no decision points, which constitute single points of failure. This enables creation of automated BORE (Break Once Run Everywhere) attack tools that can be rapidly disseminated via the Internet.

2. Dynamic. Code transformations such as obfuscation and encryption are static processes in which source code or binary is obscured in a deterministic fashion. The protection offered is not powerful enough for most antitamper needs. Further, the software cannot take action against tampering: The protection is passive.

3. Resilient. Protection, no matter how strong, will eventually be breached. Therefore, when applications are updated, protection schemes must also be renewed to ensure immunity against differential analysis. Additionally, the patch must be different enough from the original to ensure hackers cannot leverage experience from the earlier break. Any manual or source code-based effort is resource-intensive, yet a patch must be issued quickly to stem revenue leaks, leading to a vicious breach-patch cycle.

4. Easy to Use. Traditional software protection products do not give users precise control over the implementation of security; therefore, they do not allow users to build a solution that is tailored uniquely to their business requirements. Applications and environments have specific security requirements.

5. Proven. Any security technology enjoys a short hack-free duration when it is new on the market. However, to protect valuable applications with confidence for their entire lifetime, a technology must have been tested both by experts and by real hackers in the real world. Additionally, hacker sophistication evolves over time, and if your solution provider does not keep its technology one step ahead, your software will quickly fall victim to piracy.

6. Performance-Friendly. Some protection solutions impose large performance penalties when the protected program is running. These solutions force the developer to choose between degree of performance impact and percentage of application that is secured. This is an unacceptable trade-off.

7. Development-Friendly. Securing code manually is a costly and time-consuming process requiring highly skilled resources using an antitamper API, or working at the source code level. Further, any source code level implementation will not be reusable, and ongoing costs will therefore be high.

These key factors should be considered to provide maximum defense against cyberattacks, piracy, tampering or any type of threat, in order to keep companies one step ahead of hackers. The next time a foreign spy worms its way into your sensitive applications, here's what will happen: Your application will immediately notice the discrepancy and send rich forensics to your application firewall. Your security information and event management system will be notified in real-time, and your IT administrator will be able to respond effectively.

Your code integrity and intellectual property are safe behind layers of strong network and application security.

Crying out for the moon!

19 Jul 2009, 0051 hrs IST, Raghu Krishnan, ET Bureau
The moon, sweet regent of the sky,/silvered the walls of Cumnor Hall/and many an oak that grew thereby,” wrote Walter Scott in the 18th century. On May 25, 1961, the moon was not just an appendage for those on Planet Earth but a destination when President Kennedy stated at the height of the space-race between the USA and the USSR, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” Kennedy was assassinated 68 months before Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface and uttered exactly 40 years ago on July 20, 1969, the most significant words in the history of space-travel: “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.” Kennedy’s promise was fulfilled when Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins returned safely, leaving behind a plaque inscribed with the words, “Here Men from the Planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all Mankind.”

However, telecast images of astronauts walking on the lunar surface began to pall. The last Apollo mission to the Moon was in 1972 and the USA’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) decided that was it. The Moon took a back seat in Nasa’s plans once it was felt there was nothing on the lunar surface to support life.

However, in 1998, Nasa found evidence of ice on the Moon, something which could support a lunar base. The Lunar Prospector probe indicated that there was enough water locked in the polar permafrost of the Moon to support 2,000 colonists for over a century. Lunar colonisation would have been prohibitively expensive if the water had to be transported from Earth. And so, on January 15, 2004, President George W Bush announced that Nasa would attempt “to gain a new foot-hold on the Moon”. This time, the objective was to set up by 2019 a base on the moon and use it to explore the universe, beginning with the solar system.

It’s not just the Americans and the Russians who are looking at the Moon. China and India have also got into the act. As have those who believe that the Moon belongs to humanity and not just governments. Some of them are trying to work out the optimum way to reach the Moon and set up a base there for not just exploration but industrial purposes. Even while all this is going on, the Moon remains the cheapest night-light for children of a lesser god in dark continents. And the Moon continues to inspire nursery rhymes in all languages, symphonies (Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata) and lyrics like “Moon River, wider than a mile/I’m crossing you in style, some day/We’re after the same rainbow’s end/Waiting round the bend/My Huckleberry friend/Moon River and Me” from the movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. The movie was released in 1961, the same year that Kennedy committed his country to landing a man on the moon before the decade was out. And so what if the Moon River was the moonlight reflecting on the Mississippi at night!