New-Tech Europe | September 2016 | Digital Edition

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ready. “All the components were designed from the start to be easily mass produced,” says Mathieu Ackermann, the company’s CTO. The startup’s three young founders are EPFL alumni who all worked in industry before creating their own startup. They began by fleshing out their idea in their spare time before setting up their company. “Working in industry gave us what we needed to reach our goal, which was to develop solar panels that could be rapidly brought to market at a competitive price.”

at a competitive cost,” he says. “For residential systems, solar panels accounted for less than 20% of total installation costs in the United States in 2015. Even if the solar panels were free, this would not always offset the system’s cost. Currently, most of the margin earned by solar energy developers comes from subsidies. Yet these subsidies are declining.”

The founders are convinced that their solar panels will lower the price per kWh paid by consumers. The system will probably be a little more expensive to buy, “but this will be quickly offset by the additional energy that will be generated,” says Florian Gerlich, COO. “The price of solar panels has dropped sharply in recent years, but not enough to produce electricity Advantest’s T5851 Tester Wins Best of Show Award at Flash Memory Summit By combining efficiency and ease of installation, the founders of the startup hope to shake things up by making photovoltaic systems competitive with fossil energies. “Insolight has designed a highly innovative system, and these initial prototypes show an impressive yield in external assessments,” says Christophe Ballif, Director of EPFL’s Photovoltaics Laboratory. “They now need to test the limits of their concept, show how a commercial-sized system can perform, and prove the product’s economic potential.”

Leading semiconductor test equipment supplier Advantest Corporation (TSE: 6857) earned a Best of Show Award with its T5851 tester at the 11th Annual Flash Memory Summit, held August 9-11 in Santa Clara, Calif. The awards presented at the summit provide the highest honors in the flash memory and solid-state storage industry. In the category of Most

to 768 devices in parallel by using an automated component handler such as Advantest’s M6242 system. “We are proud to receive this industry acknowledgment of the innovative advances that we bring to the market for non-volatile memories, which are so vital to low-power, mobile applications,” said Masuhiro Yamada, executive

officer with Advantest. “Our T5851 system is designed for system-level testing of these devices while still providing the reliability, low-cost and high-volume productivity that the market needs.” “The booming market for new consumer electronics utilizing flash storage creates the challenge for a scalable platform for testing flash memory,” said Jay Kramer, chairperson of the Flash Memory Summit’s Awards Program. “We are proud to select Advantest’s T5851 for the Best of Show Technology Innovation Award as it is available in both production and engineering models to address a wide range of test program environments while providing the versatility to test the memory ICs powering smart phones, tablets and ultra-portable laptops.”

Innovative Flash Memory Technology, Advantest’s T5851 system was recognized for changing the way flash memory is tested to improve the performance, availability, endurance and/or energy efficiencies of electronic products. The T5851 provides multi-protocol support in one tool for high-performance universal flash storage (UFS) devices and PCIe BGA solid-state drives, minimizing customers’ capital investments and deployment risks. Its tester-per- DUT architecture and proprietary hardware accelerator deliver the fastest test times in the industry, contributing to a lower cost of test. The T5851 is designed for high-volume testing, as well as reliability and qualification testing, of protocol NAND devices. This flexible system can be configured to test up

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