New Hampshire sapphire and silicon crystal growth company
Appears at 2 points in 2 lectures.
Appearances across the corpus
Same company supplies furnaces for both sapphire and silicon crystal growth; thousands of furnaces sold to Chinese solar industry.
The company that grows this aluminum oxide, or builds the equipment for it, is up here in New Hampshire. The equipment is about a quarter the size of this room and about as tall as this room. The melting temperature of aluminum oxide is about 2,000 centigrade, so it gets pretty hot.
A New England company sold several hundred crystal-growth machines to China after China's $30 billion solar-cell investment decision. Used to illustrate how exporting capital equipment can destroy domestic competitiveness.
How valuable is all this stuff? [Tom shows a polycrystalline silicon sample.] This is polycrystalline silicon, heated and cooled over a six-week period in a furnace to make very large grain size. They make a boule of it that's about this big, and they cut it up into little chunks and make solar cells out of it. All this technology was developed right here in New Hampshire, by a company. They make the equipment, and they sold several hundred of these machines to China, because the government of China decided to invest 30 billion dollars in solar cell technology. That's not structural material, that's a functional material. Once you saturated China with the equipment, that's going to cause them to knock our socks off in competitiveness. Right now all the solar cell companies in the United States are going out of business.