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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Moonlighting in solar;For chip manufacturers, wafers 'have been like gold' of late Moonlighting in solar For chip manufacturers, wafers 'have been like gold' of late By Matt Andrejczak, MarketWatch Last Update: 12:52 PM ET Jun 13, 2007 SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Not long ago, used chip wafers were considered all but worthless, sent to landfills or recycling centers. But semiconductor makers have found a new home for the millions of wafers they exhaust each year: the emerging solar industry. Amid tight supplies of polysilicon, it's become a worthwhile side business for chip manufacturers such as Texas Instruments Inc. 'Lucrative business' These wafers "have been like gold" for the makers of chips over the past couple years, said Pat Callinan, president of Silicon Valley Microelectronics, a firm that buys and sells wafers. Whereas the chip producers "used to get very little for their wafers," it's lately become "a very lucrative business," Callinan said. It doesn't necessarily matter whether the material in question is a broken wafer or silicon powder or "tops and tails" or "pot scrap." It just needs to contain polysilicon, the key raw material used to make microchips in electronic devices and solar cells. It's been an eye-opening experience for industry veterans, who've seen a radical transformation in their business, where, till 2004, used wafers were typically little more than a nuisance. The catalyst has been the voracious appetite of the solar-energy-panel manufacturers. Mike Hayden, the chief silicon buyer at Texas Instruments, the world's largest maker of cell-phone chips, suddenly found himself slammed with offers a couple of years ago. "People started bombarding me to find out where our scrap was going," he said. "That's when I realized the stuff was getting valuable." TI no longer stuffs used test wafers into 55-gallon drums for transfer to a recycling center in the Dallas area -- paying waste-removal fees in the process -- except on occasions when, as Hayden recalled, scrap collectors were willing to ante up $100 per drum. Today, it sells almost all its wafers to solar companies in Germany, Japan, Hong Kong and elsewhere. This year, such sales will generate $8 million in revenue, according to the company's forecast. Freescale used to grind test wafers, selling the crushed silicon for 65 cents a pound to metals firms, said spokesman Glaston Ford. It had largely halted that practice by 2005 in the face of demand from solar firms. Freescale has been selling 8-inch wafers for $8 apiece and 6-inch wafers for $3.50, Ford said. Wafer crunch The appetite for the wafers stems from a supply crunch in the global polysilicon market, spurred by the growth of the solar-energy industry, which uses polysilicon in the manufacture of cells for panels that convert sunlight to electricity. "We have a stable of people in line to buy [the used wafers]," Jim Kritzer, a purchasing manager at National Semi. "We bid the stuff." Silicon Valley Micro, a small firm that used to rely primarily on chip manufacturers for sales, recently shipped 10 tons of broken wafers to China. There, factory hands engage in the laborious task of sorting for pieces with the right chemical makeup for solar use. Wafers are used by chip engineers in equipment tests, experiments and other R&D-related tasks. After a time, the wafers become too thin for those primary uses, making them ideal candidates for sale to solar-panel makers, who use a lower grade of silicon. Solar companies have been buying 6- and 8-inch wafers, some of which are called "patterned wafers." Before they are unloaded by chip manufacturers, these types of wafers must be cleaned and polished to strip away sensitive intellectual property imprinted on the silicon. Solar-panel suppliers have even been scouring the market for silicon powder -- that is, the dust that's left over from the reactors that make virgin polysilicon. It used to be swept from the factory floor into barrels. Now it can fetch as much as $250 a kilogram, according to SVM's Callinan. Matt Andrejczak is a reporter for MarketWatch in San Francisco.
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#1. To: JCHarris (#0)
recycle bump
$9 an ounce for the sweepings.... 5 times that for the pure stuff like the chips in your old cell phones, tossed computers and memory chips
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