DARPA Awards Ascent Solar Team Contract for Portable Photovoltaics (PoP) Program
Source/Type: News - Staff reports

Author: CompoundSemi News Staff

June 28, 2010... The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected Ascent Solar for an award under the Low-Cost Lightweight Portable Photovoltaics (PoP) solicitation. The Ascent Solar-led program, entitled "Flexible High-performance Tandem-junction PV Array", consists of three gated phases. The 18-month first phase of the 54-month program has an contract value of about $3.8M. The goal of PoP program is to demonstrate low-cost, lightweight photovoltaics (PV) that can stand up to battle conditions and environmental extremes while offering 20 percent or greater power conversion by the end of the program.

Other small business program participants include: ITN Energy Systems of Littleton, Colorado; Cambrios Technologies Company of Sunnyvale, California; Brewer Science of Rolla, Missouri. A large business, QinetiQ North America-TSG based in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Institute of Energy Conversion (IEC) of Newark, Deleware are also participating. These partners hope to leverage their collective expertise with dedicated funding from DARPA to meet the highly aggressive goals of the PoP program.

Farhad Moghadam, President and CEO of Ascent Solar commented, "In order to meet the aggressive goals of performance, capacity, and military toughness, our team has put together a definitive plan that combines our flexible CIGS production experience and existing MILSTD 810G military product, advanced high-temperature substrates from QinetiQ, the combined expertise in multijunction thin film technology from Ascent Solar and IEC, films for optical and electrical enhancement from Brewer and Cambrios, and enhanced packaging technologies being developed by ITN and Ascent Solar. "

See the Current Industry News Summary
See this article in its orginal context, with the other current news from the same week