All deliverables under the contract, which included a full area cell efficiency of a minimum of 20% and reliability tests according to IEC 61215, were submitted ahead of schedule and certified by the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

TetraSun’s new cell concept is based on a novel surface passivation technology that enables the use of 40 um wide copper electrodes instead of screen-printed silver metallization. Without demanding special equipment for the manufacturing process, cell Voc values in excess of 700mV are achieved on monocrystalline Czochralski grown silicon. Since its founding in 2009, TetraSun has raised $12 million from equity and strategic customer investors, which has helped the company bring its groundbreaking passivation and patterning technologies to “production ready” status, as evidenced by ongoing small scale production and deployments in the U.S. and Japan.

In 2010, TetraSun received a $2.3 million grant from the DOE to support the development of back-surface passivation research and development.