Some of San Diego’s biggest tech news last week came out of the mHealth Summit near Washington, D.C. But we’ve rounded up all the other tech news too.

—San Diego-based Mingle, an Internet holding company operating Climber.com and several affiliated businesses, said it acquired Sunnyvale, CA-based Affinity Circles to expand its job hunting and recruiting capabilities. Financial terms were not disclosed, although VentureWire pegged the deal at about $1 million. Mingle CEO Michael O’Brien told me he plans to hire another 20 to 30 employees in 2012.

—Did you notice anything different about Xconomy last week? Just in time for the holidays, we completed an extreme home-page makeover, the first in a series of changes that are intended to make Xconomy more convenient and usable. We also moved our Xconomy headquarters in Cambridge, MA. We’re interested in your feedback, so please send us a note via editors@xconomy.com. If any of this suggests that Xconomy is growing and extending its reach into the innovation community, we are!

—After launching its ViaSat-1 satellite in October, Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat (NASDAQ: VSAT) has begun a different sort of countdown. ViaSat said last week that its satellite-based Internet service is expected to begin through Wildblue Communications before December ends. ViaSat-1 is the highest capacity communications satellite ever launched into space, and download speeds for households in Wildblue’s sparsely populated service areas are expected to range from 2 megabits per second to more than 10 megabits per second.

—During the mHealth Summit near Washington D.C. last week, San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) said it formed a new subsidiary, Qualcomm Life, established a $100 million wireless health investment fund, and launched 2net Platform, a platform for distributing data from the potpourri of wireless health sources. As part of its new platform, Qualcomm also introduced the 2net Hub, a product that plugs into a standard electric outlet and serves as a gateway to the technology-agnostic, cloud-based 2net Platform.

—Other news from the mHealth Summit: Aventyn, a private health IT company based in Carlsbad, CA, said it has partnered with Annapolis, MD-based Zephyr Technology in an international, multi-center clinical study testing mobile technologies for remotely monitoring heart failure. Aventyn said the companies are working together to use Zephyr’s heart monitoring technology, which uses an Android smartphone to transmit data, with Aventyn’s remote patient monitoring and chronic disease management system.

—Independa also had news from the 2011 mHealth Summit this week. The San Diego startup unveiled Artemis, a wireless technology platform used to connect to a variety of in-home sensors for the elderly. Independa said the technology is intended to help relatives and caregivers monitor the vital signs of independent seniors, as well as room temperature, smoke, flooding, and other safety factors.

—The San Diego-based Endeka Group, a wireless Internet services provider and managed services operator, said recently it arranged $4.2 million in venture debt financing through the Agility Lease Fund of Prescott, AZ, and Trinity Capital Investment of Los Angeles. The two privately held firms specialize in financing and consulting for the broadband industry. Founded in 2004, Endeka provides wireless broadband services to campuses, military bases, hotels, convention centers, ships, and other locations.

—As part of an industry challenge to reduce the planning and installation costs of solar energy projects, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $700,000 to the San Diego-based California Center for Sustainable Energy. The team will use the funding to develop standardized rules for permitting and interconnection processes to streamline rooftop solar projects, with the idea of fostering the adoption of solar projects throughout Southern California. Considerable barriers remain to scaling up solar, according to Andrew McAllister, director of planning and strategy at the nonprofit center.

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Plastic, oil, natural gas, paper, solar panels, analytics, semiconductors, blimps, mobile phones, wind turbines, smart grid. These were some of the words tossed around by the six teams presenting at last night’s Cleantech Open Northeast Regional Finals. Three companies were selected to go on and compete in the Cleantech Open Global Forum in California next month. Interestingly, a few of the semifinalists are also part of the local startup program MassChallenge, which like the Cleantech Open, models itself as a startup accelerator and mentoring program with a business plan competition tucked into it.

Can you guess which of the words above apply to the three winning teams below? Take a look and see if you were right.

—PK Clean (a MassChallenge 2011 finalist) is “converting mountains of trash into barrels of oil.” The company has developed and tested a process that converts plastic waste into oil, using a proprietary catalyst. PK’s CEO Priyanka Bakaya, an MIT Sloan MBA, says the 45 million tons of plastic occupying landfills per year can be turned into about 9 billion gallons of oil (representing 25 percent of annual U.S. auto consumption). The company has already tested the tech at a pilot facility in India and is targeting the metal recycling industry as its first customers. After taking apart old cars, metal recyclers are left with plastic remnants that they have to pay to get landfilled. PK will take that away for free to turn into oil. There’s other competition in the field, namely from Portland, OR-based Agilyx (which recently raised $22 million in venture funding), but Bakaya says PK’s catalyst and cheaper process give it an edge.

—Qado Energy, a smart grid analytics startup, was the big IT play in the bunch. While maybe not as sexy as turning plastic to oil or printing invisible solar panels on paper (seriously), it’s aiming to solve a big problem for utilities and energy developers: accurately predicting the distribution and effect of new cleantech sources plugging into the grid. As co-founder Lorraine Wheeler explained, when wind or solar developers want to add their technology to the energy distribution grid, utilities have to perform studies analyzing the impact of the new tech on the grid, and produce a list of needed upgrades that the developer must pay for. Qado’s technology is designed to make this planning process more accurate and efficient, with software that pulls in utilities’ data from different sources and converts it to a standard format. From there, the potential effect on the grid can be modeled and analyzed in displays for utilities, regulators, and energy developers.

—Last up was fabless semiconductor developer Arctic Sand. The company is making smaller, more efficient power converter chips designed to cut down on the electricity needed to run traditional data centers. The company, whose team comes from MIT and Harvard, aims to design the chips for other applications like powering mobile phones and hopes to get its tech to the market through licensing deals with existing computing players, says CEO Nadia Shalaby. Arctic Sand was also a participant in MassChallenge earlier this year.

There were some familiar faces among the other three semifinalists. OsComp Systems—developers of a more efficient natural gas compressor—took home a check from MassChallenge last year and presented at our XSITE Xpo this year. Altaeros Energies also talked about its blimp-hoisted wind turbines at our Xpo. The last Cleantech Open Northeast semifinalist, Ubiquitous Energy, is working on the aforementioned printable solar photovoltaic cells for paper and fabric. The cells are designed to power mobile phones for owners in areas that aren’t even plugged into the power grid, and even further down the line, could enable dynamic displays on surfaces like cereal boxes (think digital display expiration dates). We’ll still have to keep an eye out for those teams.

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San Diego’s Envision Solar says Desmond Wheatley, the firm’s president and chief operating officer, succeeded founding CEO and chairman Bob Noble on Aug. 10. Noble has moved to a new role as executive chairman. The company also named a new CFO, Chris Caulson.

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The Evergreen Solar story keeps getting worse. The Marlboro, MA-based solar technology company revealed today that it is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. The court documents were not available online today, but other media outlets have reported that Evergreen (NASDAQ: ESLR), with assets of $424.5 million, owed its roughly 5,000 creditors $485.6 million.

Evergreen said it will cut another 65 jobs across the U.S. and Europe and suspend activities at its Midland, MI facility as part of its restructuring. That’s on top of the 800 workers Evergreen cut earlier this year when it shut down its Devens, MA plant. (The company had previously received grants and loans from the state of Massachusetts surrounding the Devens site.) Evergreen said in the release today that it will now be focusing more on producing solar wafer technology for other companies to use in solar cell and module products. As part of the shift, Evergreen will have about 85 workers in its Wuhan, China site focused on the wafer development.

“Since January, Evergreen Solar has been aggressively repositioning itself to fully leverage the potential our String Ribbon wafers can bring to high volume solar cell and module manufacturers as these customers are facing severe pressure to further reduce their total cost of manufacturing and particularly their wafer supply costs. The actions we are taking today enable the continued development of an industry standard wafer using Evergreen’s differentiated technology and thereby provide the lowest cost wafer to the growing solar industry,” Evergreen Solar president and CEO Michael El-Hillow said in the release today.

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An August 5 regulatory filing shows that Milpitas, CA-based NuvoSun, a maker of thin-film photovoltaic arrays, has added $8.6 million to a $3 million round first reported in January 2011. Past backers included Dow Chemical.

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Sunlogics, a Rochester Hills, MI-based developer of thin-film photovoltaic arrays for solar energy farms, revealed today (PDF) that it has collected $7.5 million in equity-based financing from Detroit-based General Motors Ventures. GM also committed to buy solar charging canopies for Chevrolet dealerships and other GM facilities, and to purchase power from large-scale solar arrays built by Sunlogics. The company said the funding will help it to open a manufacturing facility in suburban Detroit employing 200 people, and another in Ontario employing 110 workers. ”GM’s solar expansion and financial commitment provides a firm foundation for the growth of Sunlogics business worldwide and will bring more sustainable green energy to GM operations,” Sunlogic CEO Michael Matvieshen said in a statement.

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We usually bring you our review of the previous week’s business and technology news on Monday. But yesterday was so full of breaking news (Airbnb’s huge venture round, Innovalight’s acquisition by DuPont) that I just didn’t have time to write it. So, at the risk of dwelling on what’s now ancient history, here’s what we covered last week:

–Violin Memory CEO Don Basile told me the company is likely to attempt an IPO late this year or early next year. The company sells external storage arrays based on Flash memory and hopes to displace vendors like EMC, HP, Oracle, Dell, and Hitachi, whose arrays are still built around hard drives.

—WePay, an online payments startup in Palo Alto, announced that it’s going directly after digital payments giant PayPal with a new service that lets small Web merchants set up online stores for free. WePay processes credit-card payments for a 3.5 percent fee, but doesn’t charge setup fees or monthly fees, as PayPal and parent company eBay do for their online stores.

—I spent two days on the UC Berkeley campus attending True University, a “startup school” staged by San Francisco-based True Ventures. In my Friday column, I provided a CliffsNotes-style summary of the event, which was designed to help non-founder employees of True-backed companies to think about common challenges in areas like engineering, design, and customer interaction.

—Palo Alto startup Thrutu introduced an iPhone version of its system for sharing photos, maps, contacts, and other data during a phone call; the app has already proved popular on Android phones.

–My San Diego colleague Bruce Bigelow surveyed two sets of data on second-quarter venture investments, the MoneyTree report prepared by the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Dow Jones VentureSource report. The MoneyTree report found that venture investments were up slightly over the same quarter of 2010, while the Dow Jones report found that they were slightly down. Yet a third source, CB Insights, reported last week that investments were up sharply. Who to believe? It depends on whose data-gathering techniques you like best.

—While digging through the MoneyTree data, Bruce discovered this interesting tidbit: The Backplane, a stealthy social network for celebrities founded by pop megastar Lady Gaga and funded by Tomorrow Ventures, the investment fund of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, is apparently based in San Diego.

—I profiled Adchemy, where CEO Murthy Nukala argues that search engine marketers buying ads through Google’s AdWords program shouldn’t have to worry so much about which keywords to bid on. Adchemy’s system looks at an advertiser’s product catalog and uses natural-language software to predict what “intents” will drive consumers to the site, then automatically generates keywords based on those intents.

—Freelancer Tom Abate sent us an article about Cogenra, the Mountain View, CA-based company whose innovative solar arrays generate electricity and hot water at the same time.

—In deals news, SeaMicro raised $20 million, MoboTap raised $10 million, SupportSpace raised $12 million, Nevro raised $58 million, Traackr raised $1 million, and Oracle acquired Cambridge, MA-based Ksplice.

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One of the many tasks confronting the energy industry, if we’re to have any hope of sidestepping a climate catastrophe, is to dramatically increase the efficiency of photovoltaic cells, so that more of the sun’s energy can be converted into electricity. Sunnyvale, CA-based Innovalight has developed a material it calls “silicon ink” that’s helping in that regard—and solar panel manufacturers in China have been slurping it up. It’s such an attractive market that chemical giant DuPont (NYSE: DD) wants to get in. So it bought the company.

DuPont released the news this morning. The Wilmington, DE-based company’s materials are already used in about 70 percent of all photovoltaic panels manufactured around the world; for example, under the brand name Solamet, it makes the metal contact fingers that manufacturers place atop a photovoltaic panel’s crystalline silicon layer to collect the free electrons knocked loose by sunlight.

Innovalight’s silicon ink, which consists of tiny, extremely pure nanocrystals of silicon suspended in a solvent, is designed to be applied beneath those metal fingers; it gets into the crystalline silicon and acts as a doping agent, decreasing electrical resistance and allowing more electrons to make their way to the fingers. Which meant DuPont was already very familiar with the startup.

“DuPont has been working with Innovalight for four or five years from a supplier perspective, and in the last couple of years we’ve been growing closer together through product impact and business synergies,” says Rob Cockerill, the DuPont executive who has been named business manager of the new DuPont Innovalight division. “We’ve always been extremely impressed with Innovalight’s technology, so they were a natural fit for us in the photovoltaic space.”

DuPont didn’t disclose the terms of the acquisition, but it said that all 58 current Innovalight employees, including former CEO Conrad Burke (pictured above), will stay on, and that the division will remain headquartered in Sunnyvale. Burke has been named general manager of the division.

Innovalight was founded in 2002 but long struggled to find a viable market for its silicon nanocrystal technology. Its first foray, into the lighting industry, fizzled. Burke, a former Sevin Rosen partner, restarted the company in 2005 (as we explained in an October 2010 profile of Innovalight). At first he intended to remake the firm as a photovoltaic manufacturer, but after low-cost solar plants in in China gained a huge lead in solar manufacturing, Innovalight reinvented itself as a materials supplier. The company announced the first two customers for its technology, Baoding-based Yingli Solar and Shanghai-based JA Solar, in 2010. It has collected just over $60 million in venture funding over the years from a large group of investors including Apax Partners, Arch Venture Partners, Convexa Capital, EDB Investments, Harris & Harris Group, Leader Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds, Silicon Valley Bank, Triton Ventures, and Vertex Venture Holdings.

As a part of DuPont, Innovalight will have much greater reach as it attempts to convince more panel makers to incorporate silicon ink into their manufacturing process, Burke says. “They are located, in terms of sales, marketing, and tech support, in all the key regions where our customers are,” Burke says. “The very large footprint that DuPont brings to the table is something we could only dream of building ourselves over a long period of time. Also, the unspoken message here is that this brings a lot of comfort to our customers—knowing we’ve got the backing of one of the giants in the industry.”

Cockerill says DuPont won’t immediately attempt to integrate the silicon ink technology into any of its own products. But he says there will be opportunities in the near future to tweak Innovalight’s material and the Solamet metallization technology in concert drive up panel efficiency. “One of the most interesting opportunities is that if you look at Innovalight’s roadmap for the next five, six, or seven generations, it’s an exact match to Solamet; they want to do the same things we do,” Cockerill says. “Together we believe we can make a huge impact with our customers.”

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A Silicon Valley startup is trying to squeeze more energy out of sunlight by combining photovoltaic arrays with a technology to generate hot water, to lower the costs of both electricity and heat.

Based in Mountain View, CA, and backed venture capitalist Vinod Khosla among others, Cogenra Solar has fielded only two installations thus far. But CEO Gilad Almogy says Cogenra aims at a huge swath of industries and applications that require both electricity and heat, including food processing plants, pharmaceutical factories, hospitals, jails, and apartment complexes.

“Everywhere there is a significant use of heat, our systems make sense,” Almogy said.

The company, formerly known as Skywatch Energy, made a splash in November when former British Prime Minister Tony Blair took part in the unveiling of a Cogenra installation at Graton, CA-based Sonoma Wine Company, which uses the hot water to wash out wine barrels.

Cogenra employs several technical tricks to coax more than 75 percent of the energy from sunlight—most of this in the form of hot water—versus the 20 to 25 percent of an efficient photovoltaic array.

Its systems are long half-cylinders of reflective material that concentrate sunlight on a photovoltaic strip running the long way down the focal point of the array.

In addition to converting part of the sun’s rays into electrical energy, the metal in the photovoltaic strip becomes extremely hot. Cogenra runs water though an insulated metal tube behind the photovoltaic array, thus capturing that heat and using it to warm water to anywhere from 70 to 170 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on customer need.

Cogenra says customers who install its systems qualify for solar hot water system rebates, such as those provided by the California Solar Initiative (CSI), as well as rebates for electricity-generating photovoltaic systems. Taking its thermal and electricity rebates together, Cogenra says … Next Page »

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San Mateo, CA-based SolarCity, which finances residential rooftop solar installations, has collected $20 million in a Series F fundraising round, according to a report today in VentureWire. The report said half of the funds came from company chair Elon Musk, who is also CEO and chair of electric vehicle maker Tesla Motors and rocket builder SpaceX. SolarCity recently raised a new $280 million solar financing fund with help from Google.

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Fairfield, CT-based GE (NYSE: GE) and four venture capital partners said today they plan to invest a total of $63 million in 10 cleantech companies developing energy-related concepts in solar, communications and software, and building efficiency.

The funding represents the second phase of a crowd-sourcing challenge, this time focused on “Powering Your Home,” that GE launched in January with four venture capital firms, Emerald Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Rockport Capital. With today’s announcement, the partners funding a $200 million pool for the “GE ecoimagination Challenge” have so far committed to invest $134 million in companies developing advances in home energy and power grid technologies

The recepients include cleantech companies in three Xconomy cities: Boston, San Francisco and San Diego. GE says its challenge has resulted in a total of 22 new commercial partnerships, as well as the acquisition of FMC-Tech, a smart grid technology company in Shannon, Ireland, that was among 12 companies that received funding in the first-round awards announced last year.

The amount of funding invested in individual companies was not disclosed. The companies are:

Ember, Boston, MA (Communications and software)

GMZ Energy, Waltham, MA (solar systems and services; co-investment with KPCB)

Hara, San Mateo, CA (Communications and software; co-investment with KPCB)

Nuventix, Austin, TX (Building efficiency)

On-Ramp Wireless, San Diego, CA (Communications and software)

Project Frog, San Francisco, CA (Building efficiency; co-investment with RockPort Capital)

SunRun, San Francisco, CA (Residential solar systems and services; co-investment with Foundation Capital)

Viridity Energy, Conshohocken, PA (Communications and software)

VPhase, Manchester, UK (Building efficiency)

WiTricity, Watertown, MA (Communications and software)

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During a panel discussion with three cleantech investors at the Energy Infotech Forum in New York City yesterday, an audience member posed a provocative question: “What won’t you invest in?” he asked. Scott DePasquale, a partner at Braemar Energy Ventures, responded “consumer space travel.”

DePasquale was only half kidding. Ever since Braemar was founded in New York in 2003, it has invested in virtually every corner of the energy sector. “We don’t fashion ourselves as a cleantech fund,” DePasquale said during a sit-down interview at the conference. “We’re an energy venture capital firm. We invest in cleantech and renewables, but we’re also investing in any technologies that can help extract oil and gas more efficiently and in a cleaner way.” DePasquale works in Braemar’s Boston office, which opened in 2007.

Braemar, which is in the process of raising money for its third fund, has a portfolio of more than 25 investments. They run the gamut from Cerion Energy, which makes a fuel-based additive that reduces emissions, to Convey Computer, which has developed a technology to make high-performance computers run faster with less energy. Braemar also has investments in smart grid, energy storage, lighting, clean coal, solar, and biofuel technology companies.

The firm’s co-founders bring a wealth of experience and perspective to energy investing, DePasquale says. Neil Suslak has experience as an investment banker in the energy, communications, and transportations sectors. George Reichenbach ran two divisions of the industrial-products maker Norton Company. And William Lese worked for NPS Industries, which made equipment for the power industry, and Vivendi affiliate Sithe Energies, an independent power producer. “What’s unique about us is our founders have a really good sense of what it means to scale technology solutions around the utility customer,” says DePasquale, who was a vice president at GE Energy Financial Services before joining Braemar in 2009.

Braemar’s first fund made just north of $50 million in investments. An early bet on EnerNOC (NASDAQ: ENOC)—a cleantech firm that pulled off a $98 million initial public offering in 2007—helped Braemar launch a second fund with a total of $250 million to invest. And according to a May regulatory filing, Braemar is now in the process of raising $300 million for the third fund.

DePasquale makes a strong case that there’s rarely been a better time for energy entrepreneurs with good ideas to raise capital. Quoting figures from the National Venture Capital Association, he points out that cleantech companies raised … Next Page »

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The U.S. Department of Energy has offered 1366 Technologies a conditional commitment for a $150 million loan guarantee, the Lexington, MA-based developer of silicon wafers for solar cells announced today.The money will go to expanding 1366′s manufacturing capabilities and building another U.S. facility for producing silicon wafers more cheaply. The company’s first facility is expected to be completed in 2013 and add 100 jobs in Massachusetts, and the second facility, whose location is yet to be determined, is expected to add 300 jobs, 1366 said.

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San Mateo, CA-based SolarCity and Mountain View, CA-based Google announced today that Google has invested $280 million in a new project financing fund that will help SolarCity extend solar panel installation leases to more homeowners. Google joins six other SolarCity financing partners who have created $1.28 billion in overall project funds overall. In a blog post, Google also said it has created a discount program for Google employees who want to install rooftop solar arrays through SolarCity’s power purchase agreements.

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Agile Energy, a San Bruno, CA-based developing utility-scale photovoltaic power projects, said this week that it has raised $24 million in additional capital from previous backer Good Energies Capital. “This investment will ensure Agile has access to the capital necessary to push forward with the development of its projects,” which have not been publicly identified, said Good Energies head John Breckenridge in a statement. Agile co-founder Glen Davis and Robert Morgan hail from Ausra, a venture-backed developer of solar thermal technologies.

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Liquid Metal Battery, an MIT spinout that is building a battery made of liquid-state cathode, anode, and electrolyte components, has nabbed a seed investment from Bill Gates and an undisclosed oil driller, CNET reports. The aim is to cut the cost of energy storage and enable batteries to store hours of wind and solar power, according to the report. The company is expected to announce its full Series A funding next month.

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Sunnyvale, CA-based Innovalight, whose “silicon ink” material increases the efficiency of photovoltaic panels, said Friday that it has won a $3.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to speed up production of silicon ink. The award is part of the DOE’s “SunShot” program, which aims to reduce the cost of residential and utility solar power by 75 percent by 2020.

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Braemar Energy Ventures, which has offices in New York and Boston, plans to raise $300 million for a new fund, according to an SEC filing. Braemar focuses on energy technology and is invested in more than 25 companies in the fields of oil and gas, lighting, solar, clean coal, biofuels, smart grid, and more. Its current investments include South San Francisco-based Solazyme, a company that’s making clean energy from algae and other marine microorganisms and that recently filed for an initial public offering.

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The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center said today that it will launch an initiative called Solarize Massachusetts to encourage residents and businesses to adopt solar photovoltaic panels on a community-wide level. The program will deploy in the four pilot communities of Harvard, Hatfield, Scituate, and Winchester initially, and will use education, marketing, and group purchasing to get solar technology into buildings and homes. Solarize Massachusetts is now soliciting proposals from solar integrators with group purchasing models.

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The French semiconductor manufacturer Soitec generated headlines in San Diego last month when it said it has been working with Tenaska Solar Ventures to develop a 150-megawatt solar plant in the desert east of San Diego—at an estimated cost of $500 million.

To support the project Soitec also revealed plans to build a factory somewhere in San Diego County to manufacture the proprietary solar panels that will be used to generate enough electricity for an estimated 55,000 households in the San Diego area.

Yesterday, Soitec Chairman and CEO André-Jacques Auberton-Hervé returned to San Diego with what he calls “a California story, but from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.” He briefed local reporters about the project, which needs a federal loan guarantee to secure financing, and later met with local officials to garner their support.

Soitec says its Concentrix Solar CPV (concentrating photovoltatic) technology converts sunlight into electric power at better than 37 percent efficiency for direct current, or at roughly 25 percent for alternating current. With some additional advances, Auberton-Hervé says the company’s technology should enable Soitec to increase the energy output of its solar modules to an unprecedented 50 percent DC efficiency in coming years.

As part of Soitec’s broader corporate strategy, Auberton-Hervé says the company’s Concentrix Solar division has worked with Chevron to complete construction of a 1-megawatt solar facility north of Taos, in Questa, NM. Auberton-Hervé says the facility, which has 173 Concentrix Solar panels that track the sun to maximize energy production, represents Soitec’s first “utility scale” project in the United States—and the first in a series of solar ventures the company aspires to develop. At least 30 states have established minimum requirements for renewable energy (California recently enacted a requirement for 33 percent renewable energy by 2020), making the U.S. an attractive market, especially in the sunbelt states, according to Auberton-Hervé.

André-Jacques Auberton-Hervé

Auberton-Hervé co-founded Soitec in 1992 with Jean-Michel Lamure to commercialize so-called “atomic scalpel” technology that is used to create multiple, ultra-thin layers in the silicon wafers used to make semiconductors. The technology led them to develop Silicon-On-Insulator (the “SOI” in Soitec) material, which has helped semiconductor makers create faster and more powerful processors by shrinking the distance between microcircuit patterns from 180 nanometers to less than 45 nanometers.

Soitec has grown from four employees in 1992 into a public company and global player in the semiconductor industry, with about 1,200 employees and a market valuation equivalent to roughly $1.4 billion, Auberton-Hervé says.

The CEO says Soitec’s solar strategy began to emerge in 2003, when … Next Page »

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