Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California (Berkeley, CA) have developed a semiconductor-polymer photovoltaic material. They claim that it can be made in the same nearly infinite variety of shapes as pure polymers.
"The advantage of hybrid materials consisting of inorganic semiconductors and organic polymers is that potentially you get the best of both worlds," says Janke Dittmer, a staff scientist working on the project. "Inorganic semiconductors offer excellent, well-established electronic properties, and they are very well-suited as solar cell materials. Polymers offer the advantage of solution processing at room temperature, which is cheaper and allows for using fully flexible substrates, such as plastics."