What can we expect from rooftop photovoltaic arrays on our homes, businesses, and public buildings?  What are the opportunities and challenges we face as we look to America’s brownfields – waste sites and other industrial properties – to extend solar power’s reach? And how shall we reckon with the prospects and pitfalls of building utility-scale solar plants on our farmlands and natural open spaces?

Moore’s Law has set great expectations that the performance/price ratio of commercially available semiconductor devices will continue to improve exponentially at least until the end of this decade. Although the physics of nanoscale silicon transistors alone could allow these expectations to (almost) be met, the physics of the metal wires that connect these transistors places stringent limits on the performance of integrated circuits.

Southern California Edison is working to help achieve California’s ambitious carbon reduction goals by modernizing its distribution system to be flexible, adaptable and capable of two-way electrical flows to better integrate distributed energy resources – such as demand side management (Energy Efficiency/Demand Response), rooftop solar, electric vehicles and energy storage – while maintaining the reliability, safety, and power quality customers count on.

President Obama is setting up National Networks for Manufacturing Institutes and UCSB is the West Coast hub for the American Institute on Manufacturing Integrated Photonics (AIM Photonics). This Institute is focused on developing an end-to-end integrated photonics ecosystem in the U.S., including domestic foundry access, integrated design tools, automated packaging, assembly and test, and workforce development.

Data centers are driving the development of next-generation photonic technologies with the promise of higher performance at lower cost. Worldwide research encompasses multi- and single-mode links, all-photonic switching and routing technologies, and hybrid networks combining electrical and optical switching. 

Renewable and ultra-low emissions and high efficiency energy conversion systems will be required to introduce energy resource and environmental sustainability. Next generation power systems must be designed for dynamic dispatch to complement the intermittencies of renewable power, which must be increasingly utilized. The complex interactions of the heat transfer, chemistry, electrochemistry, and fluid dynamics must be considered in the design and control of dispatchable power systems such as gas turbine, fuel cell and hybrid fuel cell gas turbine systems.

Solar cells based on the perovskite-structured light absorber CH3NH3PbI3 have recently emerged at the forefront of solution-processable photovoltaic devices, with power conversion efficiencies as high as 20.1% having now been certified. In this presentation, I will discuss our research group’s work in the area of perovskite solar cells. Our early work demonstrated that room temperature solution-processing techniques can be used to prepare devices on flexible substrates while retaining excellent power conversion efficiencies.

Printed opto-electronics is a new technology envisioning the fabrication of opto-electronic devices using printing methodologies. In this presentation I will describe the materials synthesis, development, and process engineering enabling the fabrication of unconventional opto-electronic devices, such as circuits and solar modules, all on flexible foils using several new materials.1-3 Examples of unconventional electronic materials include organic small molecular and polymeric semiconductors, metal chelates and complexes, and hybrid organic-inorganic metal oxides.

Solar cells based on the perovskite-structured light absorber CH3NH3PbI3 have recently emerged at the forefront of solution-processable photovoltaic devices, with power conversion efficiencies as high as 20.1% having now been certified. In this presentation, I will discuss our research group’s work in the area of perovskite solar cells. Our early work demonstrated that room temperature solution-processing techniques can be used to prepare devices on flexible substrates while retaining excellent power conversion efficiencies.

The answer is: Relieve driver developers from doing power management. Non-CPU devices on a modern system-on-a-chip, ranging from accelerators to I/O controllers, account for a significant portion of the chip area. It is therefore vital for system energy efficiency that idle devices can enter a low-power state while still meeting the performance expectation. This is called device runtime power management for which individual device drivers in commodity OSes are held responsible today.