Selling unusable silicon wafers to solar cell makers is good for the environment, and companies like TI make money at it too. Chipmakers' silicon scraps feed solar industry's hunger | ZDNET X ...

Erase those old circuits and you've got some silicon for solar panels. Big Blue hopes the technique will take off with chipmakers. Photos: Reclaiming silicon with water ...

A reclamation process at IBM’s Burlington, Vt., plant uses an innovative pattern-removal technique to turn scrap semiconductor wafers into silicon-based solar panels, among other things. The ...

For solar boom, scrap silicon for this promising mineral. ScienceDaily . Retrieved June 2, 2025 from www.sciencedaily.com / releases / 2020 / 08 / 200803140003.htm ...

Commentary: Scrap wafers just a drop in the ocean for solar cell material shortage. Nuying Huang, Taipei; Rodney Chan, DIGITIMES Asia Friday 24 November 2006 0.

A shortage of silicon was threatening two fast-growing industries — computer chipmakers and solar panel manufacturers, until they found a way to turn one company’s trash into another’s treasure.

Wafer scrap rates have reached up to 5 to 10 percent, a rate that is hard to bear for manufacturers when the price for a wafer is NT$300,000, he said. The institute uses a nanosecond pulsed laser ...

IBM has come up with a cleaner way to reuse scrap silicon leftover from the chipmaking process. IBM has come up with a cleaner way to reuse scrap silicon leftover from the chipmaking process. Its ...

An insufficient supply of polysilicon, which has spurred the price of silicon wafers to a new high, has caused industry players to consider the possibility of using scrap wafers that have been ...

A Chinese ban on imports of a waste material used for solar wafers may be bad news for foreign competitors but it is a big boost to China's solar sector. Skip to main content.

Now, the company sells about 1 million scrap wafers from its fabrication facilities in Texas, Germany and Japan to the solar industry, where they get converted into solar cells.