Ampulse secures $8 million funding for development of new Film-Silicon technology

Ampulse Corporation disclosed its $8 million Series A funding co-led by Globespan Capital Partners and El Dorado Ventures, who are joined now by existing investors Battelle Ventures and its affiliate fund, Innovation Valley Partners. As a direct result of the funding, Daniel Leff of Globespan and Jeff Hinck of El Dorado Ventures have been appointed to Ampulse’s board of directors.

“The commitment from our new venture partners provides us the support that will help us bring our innovative c-Si thin-film technology to market," said Steve Hane, president and chief executive officer of Ampulse. “Through our research partnerships with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Ampulse’s next-generation c-Si thin-film technology will deliver a highly efficient and flexible form factor thin-film solution with the lowest total system cost to address the needs of our customers.”

Ampulse is developing what they term as film-silicon technology. It is a thin-film PV technology that optimizes crystalline silicon energy conversion efficiency while lowering manufacturing costs for existing silicon based technologies. The company’s film-silicon product uses hot-wire chemical vapor deposition techniques to place a thin layer of crystalline silicon onto a flexible metallic substrate. Ampulse aims to offer lower cost, high-throughput fabrication of high efficiency flexible cells utilizing the industry’s traditional PV equipment, offer two times gain in module efficiency, 75% reduction of cost, 60 times reduction in layer thickness, 60 times reduction in deposition process time and to eliminate the need to insert multiple junctions at slow deposition rates.