"Silicon is well known. Of course, it's used in all its conical devices, computers, and cell phones. It's a well-established semiconductor material. But actually, looking at silicon itself as a semiconductor, it's not ideally suited to convert sunlight into electrical power because it's called an indirect semiconductor material - meaning that it actually has a relatively poor ability to absorb sunlight and to convert it into electronic processes to provide electricity. So, the idea of different types of thin film materials like copper indium gallium diselenide [CIGS] which I developed, is that you only need one micron of this material, which is a thousand thousandth of the thickness of a human hair to absorb 99% of the incoming sun," Professor Alberts noted.