Manufacturing feasibility of high efficiency, miniaturised and customised Photovoltaic components for wearable and IoT applications

Lightricity has developed and commercialised world leading efficiency photovoltaic (PV) technology which is up to 6x better at harvesting energy than commercially available silicon-based PV. This renewable energy source can enable the IoT to overcome the barriers of battery-related waste and maintenance costs thus enabling it to be more scalable and sustainable.

In recent years Lightricity have sought to migrate manufacturing of its PV component and system to Europe and the UK in order to address a range of shortcomings of offshore production including responsiveness for customisation and disruptions of supply. We have options for all stages of manufacture in Europe and the UK now other than the assembly packaging and test step. There are UK packaging houses that have general capabilities in the packaging techniques of relevance, however, each has proven uncomfortable with what they perceive to be a high level of risk in applying these techniques to our PV due to requirements for custom shapes, small sizes, thickness reduction and ruggedisation. This inability to bridge the gap from semiconductor research to actual commercial volume production is an addressable shortcoming.

This project therefore aims to address the feasibility of transferring our PV packaging stage to UK suppliers by carrying out technical de-risking activities at Lightricity and with selected packaging houses and transferring knowledge from our experiences working with overseas suppliers. We will focus, in particular, on packaging techniques combined with smart interconnect methods. By supporting the companies to overcome the risk hurdles, we will enable them to scale up to cost effective and flexible UK volume manufacture of packaged PV which can then underpin global opportunities to lead the scalable and sustainable deployment of the IoT.