 Hi, I'm Peter Harrop, I'm Chairman of ID TechX and I'm interviewing here the poke at Altar Devices. Altar Devices is in this leading-edge world where we have solar panels and they are often flexible and they're often much more efficient. You get much more electricity and I want to learn more about this because it interests me from the point of view of electric vehicles that can be energy independent as long as it suns out or even when it's not out using a battery. And they're being applied here apparently to wearable technology so Rich, the Rich Kapitzer is going to answer my questions. Can you tell us a bit? Yes, so as you mentioned we are a solar cell technology company. We manufacture everything here in the US actually a couple miles down the street in Sunnyvale and we make solar cells out of gallium arsenide. That's what makes ours different from the rest of the industry. And the goal of the company was just to make it as cheap as possible because gallium arsenide is a pretty expensive material to work with. But it has tremendous performance attributes so we hold the world record for efficiency at almost 29%. We work great in low light, we have a very flat temperature coefficient so there's just a whole slew of properties that are really nice with gallium arsenide. And in the end what we ended up making are these really thin flexible solar cells which can go into vehicles of all types either airplanes or cars or what not. As well as you mentioned indoor applications such as IoT sensors for energy harvesting use and wearables and there's just a whole bunch of other things that we're looking at as well. So anywhere there's a battery we make that battery either go away or last longer. That's really exciting because I remember we had Boeing Spectralab talking 10 years ago and they were saying that to be honest gallium arsenide like gallium arsenide germanium in layers was something that was so expensive it was really only on satellites. They said we think we can bring it to Earth. Well you have done it. That's right. When we started off they thought what we were trying to do was impossible and we've proven that that's not the case. And we literally grow these tiny films, these really thin films onto a substrate. Oh you actually manufacture yourself? Yeah. Right here in Sunnyvale. Right. And so what do you think is the biggest opportunity for you? Is it the small wearable technology or a large area on say a vehicle? It's both. In fact it's IoT devices, it's wearables and it's vehicles. Those are the three big categories. Right. And does it have decent life? They do. In fact because it's a monocrystalline gallium arsenide there's hardly any degradation. So it's a single junction. Single junction, that's right. So it's very stable material. When they get hot they reduce efficiency. By a bit but it's much better than other solar technologies. Stars are so high, so good that you remain good. But even as a percentage the percent reduction is quite small. And you can form part of a structure. I mean we think that structural electronics is a really big thing now instead of components in a box or glass panels put on your house as an afterthought. This can actually part be an integral part of a wristwatch, an aircraft wing, whatever. That's right. In fact we've had customers that have put this into a carbon fiber mold upside down and built up the actual solar cells directly into the surface of the structure. So you can imagine this on a wearable or a consumer device. Do you need control disposal or not? No, they pass all the recyclability requirements. The cadmium telluride ones are not really allowed, are they? That's right. You can put them on a building but it has to be a controlled removal because of the cadmium after 20 years and they're not going to appear on anything a child can buy or anything like that. So you've got a safe product that is available as a widely dispersed volume product. Indeed. How exciting. That's wonderful. Now you say you're a relatively small company? We are. We're about 130 people. Tell us about the total in your eye. Are you going global? Are you global already or what are you doing? We were acquired a little over a year ago by a big Chinese energy company. Oh really? And so that's really what's funding our build out. Yes, energy. Indeed. So they will do what? They are essentially funding our scale out. So we're going to build a larger factory here in our facility in Sunnyvale and then we're going to then take it overseas and build a much larger factory overseas in China. So that's their benefit but it's the main market strongly in China and globally. That's right. That's right. How interesting. So at the moment you're not yourself then setting up foreign offices? We haven't set up any foreign offices yet but we will. We'll have to see how we go forward. Any ambitions for Europe where I come from? We actually have customers in Europe already. You do? All right. Where do they put these things? I can't say. Oh it's a secret. Oh there we go. Right. Secret stuff. But you can be any shape, any format, whatever. Yeah. Absolutely. This is actually interestingly enough. This is an analog devices development board that uses their energy harvesting chip and runs off of just one of our solar cells. So it produces enough power to run a small little wireless center node using their energy harvesting chip. You're one of the key enabling technologies for the internet of things. Exactly. Because all too often these microcontroller boards are bigger than that and that is embarrassingly big because it can't go in the application. That's right. So that's most exciting. Do you sometimes link that with other forms of energy harvesting? For instance the old one of good weather bad weather or in the bad weather you might use thermoelectrics or piezoelectric or something. Some of our customers are interested in exploring that world. We don't do that. No. Obviously we provide a solar piece. Do you have value added resellers? We don't today. No. But that could come. Exactly. Yeah. All right. And do you have the big car companies talk to you? We do. Yeah. In fact we do quite a few in fact. Wonderful. So that's the most that we need to hit in order to fully be able to explore the automotive industry. There's a quality piece that we need to go and solve. It'll be an upmarket product initially. Right. Perhaps. Exactly. It's valuable to them to get rid, not just to power a vehicle but in the case of all the copper wire in a vehicle it affects the range and a lot of the car companies I know would like to have a lot of the sensors, even the lights, work from locally garnered and then you throw away a lot of copper wire and the same thing true in an aircraft. So you're aware of, you're into that sort of conversation. Absolutely. We think you've got a marvellous future. We think that you have a tremendous potential and it's wonderful and a great privilege to talk to you. Thank you very much. Wonderful. Wonderful.