Your daily dose of Photovoltaic Technology Developments and Solar News

How do flexible electronics, American football, financial and market results, politics, and photovoltaics go together? They don't, except as fodder for some Monday morning perspectives on Chip Shots.

Watching the New York Giants upset the mighty New England Patriots in the Super Bowl got me thinking about one flexible display application that hasn't received much attention. When the camera zoomed in on the Giants' Eli Manning or the Pats' Tom Brady in the huddle, the two quarterbacks were often seen referring to a plastic/fabric band wrapped around their left wrists, which listed the various plays to be called.

It doesn't take much to imagine a next-generation version of the wristband, one enabled with flexible, plastic display technology, two-way wireless links, and video feeds (or at least still-image feeds), which would connect the QB (and other players) to the coaches in a very real-time way. Plays would be sent in or quickly referred to in a playbook database, photos or minivideos of the defensive alignments would be accessible, helpful stats could be there at a player's fingertips, etc. The device would have to be rugged and stand up to inclement weather conditions, as well as the punishment of the QB getting sacked or hit by rampaging defensive linemen, mad-dog linebackers, and blitzing safeties.

The US Army already has devices like this in the prototype stage (as part of its Future Combat Systems work, carried out at the Army's own labs and at partner locations such as the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University), so it's not a stretch to see flexible electronics-enabled wristbands possibly coming onto the gridiron and other sporting/outdoor venues in the not-too-distant future.

The Semiconductor Industry Association announced the chip industry's 2007 global sales numbers last week, Exxon Mobil posted its annual results for the fiscal year, Microsoft said it wants to buy Yahoo for a serious chunk of change, and other companies played their part in the quarterly frenzy known as "earnings season." A comparison of the numbers provides ample opportunities for a dollars-and-sense reality check, albeit in a very apples-and-oranges kind of way.

SIA said that chip sales reached a record $255.6 billion in 2007, the sixth straight year that the sector has seen positive growth. Exxon Mobil all by its lonesome posted revenues and other income to the tune of $404.55 billion and net income of $40.6 billion. When compared to the 2006 figures ($247.7 billion for SIA, $377.63 billion for Exxon Mobil), the gap between the total sales of the entire semi industry and the world's largest oil company continues to expand.

Exxon Mobil's income alone is within a few billion of what Microsoft has offered to pay for Yahoo (an admittedly moving target as stock prices fluctuate in the aftermath of the news). The corporate behemoth's profits also hover within a few billion of another semi industry metric: capital expenditures. In Gartner Dataquest's latest data, the capex for the Top 20 chipmakers in 2007 came in at just over $42 billion. Dataquest expects a hefty 16.6% cut in capex in 2008, downgrading its already pessimistic -13.2% forecast from earlier in the year. Exxon's capital and exploration budget ---$20.85 billion in 2007---continues to grow.

Just for fun, I broke down Exxon Mobil's numbers to daily and hourly chunks, and compared those quotients to the recently announced financials from a couple of semi equipment companies. What were the average daily revenues for the energy giant last year? About $1.108 billion. Average hourly revenues? Some $46.18 million. Average revenues per minute? Almost $770,000.

Now put those side by side with the results announced by Novellus and Mattson last week. Novellus said its annual revenues for 2007 were $1.57 billion, while Mattson posted sales of more than $267 million. So in less than day and a half Exxon Mobil sees roughly the same amount of money flow into its coffers as Novellus does in an entire year, while Mattson gets passed by Big Oil in less than 6 hours. On the income side, Exxon netted $40.6 billion in FY07, or about $111.2 million per day, $4.6 million per hour, and $77,000 per minute. In this case, Novellus's profits of nearly $214 million take about two days to filter into Exxon's accounts, while Mattson's $27.6 million net income needs 6 hours for absorption.

With the California presidential primary election taking place tomorrow, I didn't want to let slide a photovoltaic moment from last week's campaign trail. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger used Solar Integrated Technologies' factory as the venue to announce his endorsement of John McCain for the Republican nomination for president, as former candidate and recent McCain endorser Rudy Giuliani looked on. The image of those particular politicos holding forth in that particular location elicited some unusual responses, since Republicans (other than Arnold, J Mac, and a handful of others) don't have the strongest clean-tech platforms, and the company is based in south Los Angeles, a part of town better known for being a tough neighborhood than as a hotbed of renewable energy manufacturing.

Solar Integrated makes portable systems and "solar tents," but its bread-and-butter products are building-integrated PV roofing systems, which benefit from a proprietary process that laminates flexible amorphous-silicon thin-film PV cells from Uni-Solar into heavy-duty roofing "fabrics." In addition to the news around the Governator's words, the company said it is ramping production to round-the-clock, 24/7 status to meet growing demand. Solar Integrated has seen a strong pull from the market lately, having signed several multimillion-dollar deals for PV roofing projects in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the US in recent months.