Pursuant to the terms of the agreement between Apollo and the NJIT, the NJIT will provide available laboratory instruments, equipment and personnel to develop materials and technology that will improve CdTe thin film PV efficiency.
As a sponsor, Apollo will have an exclusive option and right of refusal to obtain a royalty-bearing license on commercially reasonable terms to the NJIT’s ownership interest in certain intellectual property resulting from the research center’s performance of this agreement.
Renyi Hou, chairman and CEO of Apollo, said: “Close cooperation between the company and the NJIT is expected to improve our semiconductor material quality and speed up our new material development. Currently, all the world’s supply of tellurium is a byproduct of copper, zinc or lead mining, resulting in CdTe source material with significant and uncontrollable amounts of these impurities.
“Apollo is the sole owner of independent tellurium mines which could supply better materials for the world’s CdTe thin film solar cell industry based upon current research. Apollo also has the refining expertise to improve the purity of the mined tellurium. We anticipate that the Apollo – NJIT cooperation will combine the NJIT’s semiconductor physics knowledge with Apollo’s refining expertise to define the CdTe material properties that may improve the CdTe solar cell efficiency significantly.”
