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Dr. Basol has over 30 years of experience in the field of PV. He received his B.S. from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey and Ph.D. from UCLA in solid-state electronics. After graduation, he led the R&D activities at Monosolar Inc., where he developed a high efficiency PV technology based on electroplated CdTe. In 1984, electroplated CdTe technology was transferred to SOHIO/BP and eventually yielded the highest efficiency CdTe PV modules at that time. After Monosolar, Dr. Basol co-founded International Solar Electric Technology (ISET) with two other partners and was in charge of the technology development in the company. During this period he acted as the Principal Investigator of a large number of development programs funded by DOE, NASA, DOD, DOC, and aerospace corporations, and innovated vacuum and non-vacuum based techniques for CIGS and CdTe-based thin film solar cell fabrication. Among these were novel nano-ink based approaches that yielded the highest efficiency CIGS devices (over 12%) made by ink methods at the time. Dr. Basol also developed the first efficient flexible CIS solar cell structure on polymeric substrates for which he received an innovation award from NASA. In 2000 he joined NuTool Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up company, as a Board Member and Chief Technical Officer, where he led the efforts to develop novel copper electroplating, electrochemical mechanical deposition, electropolishing, and electrochemical mechanical polishing processes and tools for IC interconnect applications. In 2004 ASM International acquired NuTool, and Dr. Basol became the CTO of the new company, ASM NuTool. Dr. Basol has 78 issued and over 65 pending patents in the fields of PV, materials processing, and electrochemical processes and tools for semiconductor manufacturing. The core technology of SoloPower is based on one of Dr. Basol's innovations employing high-throughput, low-cost electroplating techniques for high efficiency CIGS device fabrication. Dr. Basol has over 100 publications. | 