Quadra Power, established in 2016, is a renewable energy company whose key focus area is solar project construction and development of PV plants, both “on” and “off-grid”. QPI brings an experienced construction management team, with over 200 MW of direct solar power construction projects, together with the business, finance, and engineering experience of its sister company Quadra Solar, which was established in 2007.

microJoining Solutions (mJS) is an internationally provider of the field of packaging and assembling miniature and micro-miniature electro-mechanical components and assemblies using the latest feedback controlled resistance welding, pulsed YAG laser welding, and ultrasonic metal welding equipment. nnThe company's focus is on saving users money by improving yields in their present welding processes and preventing welding failures in their product design phase. nnmJS has developed a special expertise in welding automotive components and sensors, medical devices, and solar cell assemblies. mJS is very familiar with both automotive and FDA process documentation and validation.

Jem Enterprises is a company that received a SBIR Phase I grant for a project entitled: Tin(II) Sulfide Photovoltaics. Their project aims to develop photovoltaic devices based on tin (II) sulfide (SnS). The properties of SnS, including bandgaps, carrier density and mobility, chemical and thermal stability, and metallurgical properties, promise the possibility to achieve relatively high conversion efficiency given state-of-art process control and device design. In this project, close space sublimation (CSS) technique, a thin film fabrication method proven for low cost and high manufacturability, will be used to synthesize SnS. The broader/commercial impact of this project will be the potential to produce photovoltaic devices based on low-cost and environmentally-friendly materials. There is no doubt that solar electricity has attracted a lot of attention in recent years as an alternative and renewable energy source. However, most of the current solar cell technologies have one or more of the following issues that, (1) raw materials are not abundantly available; (2) toxic materials are used; (3) overall cost is high. This project will address these issues by developing photovoltaic devices using SnS, a semiconductor material that can be supplied on a massive scale and at low recovery costs.

Gratings Incorporated is a company that received a STTR Phase I grant for a project entitled: High Efficiency Thin-film Photovoltaics on Low-cost Substrates by Layer Transfer. Their their award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and their project will apply high aspect ratio, nm-scale, columnar, and crystalline Si structures as templates for high-quality growth of thin-film GaAs solar cells on low-cost flexible substrates. Sub-10-nm Si seed layers are expected to facilitate growth of low-defect density GaAs films. The aspect ratio of nm-scale structures also serve as sacrificial layers for removal of completed GaAs solar cell. Epitaxial growth and characterization of GaAs films on nm-scale Si structures will be carried out at the Center for High Technology at the University of New Mexico. Successful phase I STTR research will lead to commercialization of high (~ 20 %) efficient, flexible solar cells for applications in a wide range of terrestrial and space environments. Multiple substrate re-use and inherent large area processing capability of Si will result in significant cost reductions. High quality heteroepitaxial GaAs growth on Si has been a subject of intense research. Due to its direct bandgap, GaAs is attractive for a number of optoelectronics applications and its integration with Si-based microelectronics has been a cherished goal. The lattice and thermal expansion mismatches with Si make it difficult to grow good device quality layers. We have recently demonstrated as the Si seed dimension is reduced below 100 nm dimensions, the quality of heteroepitaxial growth increases rapidly. The nm-scale Si structures are formed using low-cost, large area methods based on conventional integrated circuit processing methods. Successful research effort will lead to reduction in PV generation costs, and enhanced applicability of thin-film PV in terrestrial and space environments because in contrast with competing thin-film solar cells, GaAs thin-film solar cells will not suffer from light-induced performance degradation.

The Power-Spar is a high efficiency solar concentrator that can be configured for electricity, heat, cooling and/or lighting solutions. The Power-Spar system consists of a parabolic trough reflector which concentrates the sun's energy onto a modular absorber. The absorber converts the sun's energy to electricity (via high efficiency multi-sun photovoltaic cells), or to heat (via a patented absorption surface) or transports the light to the buildings' interior (via optical cabling). The system is designed for easy integration with heat recovery systems, turbines, thermal based chillers and geo-thermal solutions to maximize the thermal, electrical and lighting outputs. This efficient co-generation yields unprecedented dollar value. Capable of capturing up to 80% of the sun's energy, Power- Spar systems can reduce typical building energy bills by as much as 70%/year!

Banpil Photonics is a company that received a SBIR Phase I grant for a project entitled: Significantly High-Efficiency a-Si Photovoltaic Cell. Their project seeks to develop significantly high-efficiency photovoltaic-cells (a.k.a. solar-cells) for clean electrical energy generation commercial applications. Conventional solar cell has the limitation in conversion efficiency, basically structured dependent. For example, it is ~18% for Si-crystal and 10% for amorphous-Si (a-Si) based Solar cell. It is required to develop solar cell utilizing material systems, which are matured, friendly to manufacturing, and can be fabricated using low-cost substrate (e.g. glass). A goal of the Phase I program is to carry on research and development of a-Si-solar cell for conversion efficiency of >25%, utilizing the glass-substrate. The design, performance simulation, and parameters optimization will be carried out during the Phase I activity period. The proposed high-efficiency a-Si solar cell structure is widely applicable to next generation commercial applications. According to the recent report from the US Department of Energy (DOE), today's global market for solar cells for all commercial applications is $7-billion and it is estimated to grow with >40% per year, reaching $39-billion in 2014. Commercial applications include residential applications (on-grid/off-grid), industrial applications (both on-grid and off-grid), and consumer products (e.g. cell phones, PDAs). Banpil Photonics is a company that received a SBIR Phase I grant for a project entitled: High Speed Flexible Printed Circuit (FPC). Their Project will investigate an innovative high-speed Flexible Printed Circuit (FPC) utilizing conventional material (like Polyimide) and standard manufacturing process. With the continued growth in integration density of CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) technology and clock frequency of chips, the aggregate bandwidth required between future-generation chip and chipsets will increase sharply. Driving serial or parallel data at high speed over conventional flexible board (i.e. flexible) is becoming a severe design constraint in many applications. Today, divding high speed signal into several low speed signals and driving those signals in parallel are common. Utilizing this technique will not fully utilize the chip speed and thereby overall system performance will not be improved siginificantly. The proposed technology will produce the high speed FPC which will have high signal carrying capacity. Utilizing such FPC will help to increase the system performance significantly. The objectives of the project are to identify the best structural configuration and its optimization, to design the polymer-based FPC, and to establish the feasibility of high speed FPC board. In this project, prototypes will be made and evaluated, measurements of relevant characteristics will be conducted, and a development path for the next phase of the project will be identified. The project has the potential to produce the high speed interfaces suitable for next generation digital and RF system applications. The direct commercial potential of the project lies in interface products, manufactured using this technology for HDTV, flat-panel display, networking equipments, imaging and video systems, etc. Banpil Photonics is a company that received a SBIR Phase I grant for a project entitled: Multipurpose and Multispectral Sensor for Geo-science and Astronomical Instruments. Their research project will develop monolithic multicolor sensor array with high quantum efficiency, high speed for numerous system applications. Today's sensor arrays are designed to work either in visible or in near infrared region. None of these can provide broad spectral response (300 nm to 2500 nm). The goal is to identify suitable sensor array structures for broad range detection, with combined high quantum efficiency, and high speed. A second goal is to identify a photodiode or sensor array structure where each pixel can be addressed independently. The design, performance simulation, and also physical parameters optimization will also be carried out as a part of this research activity. The broader impact of this research is that broad spectral image sensors are required for various ground-based, air-borne, space-borne geo-science instruments for the atmospheric properties measurement, surface topography, range detection, remote sensing, and real-time monitoring of biological systems. To date, several sensors covering different spectral ranges are used for this purpose. Next generation geo-science and astronomical instrumentation require single sensor that can detect multiple spectral bands (300 to 2500 nm of wavelengths) and could be used for multiple earth-science measurements. Use of single sensor having multifunctional capability can make the instrument unusually small, light and low-power requirement. Banpil Photonics is a company that received a SBIR Phase I grant for a project entitled: Innovative High Speed Electrical Chip-to-Chip Interconnects for Next Generation Systems. Their project proposes chip-to-chip interconnects that can be applied in the mother boards/ backplanes of high performance networking systems and/or computing systems, where 10 Gb/s and beyond signal speed per channel (serial) is necessary. An innovative cost-effective high speed (> 20Gb/s per channel) electrical interconnect technology, which can increase the signal carrying capacity of the board-level interconnects more than 6 times than the conventional technology is proposed. This can help to route the signal longer distances (at given signal-speed) at lower cost by using standard dielectric material. The company will investigate the design, feasibility of the concept, process development, and data analysis approaches in order to create a high speed interconnect PCB board, and each can carry the signal as high as 20 Gb/s. The proposed high speed electrical chip-to-chip interconnects will have applications in high speed PCs, high-speed servers, networking systems, gaming machines, communications systems, imaging and video systems.