GT Advanced Technologies Inc fka GTAT

[XenaLives]

There was a lot going on in Mesa that we don't know about...

From an old Matt MargolisSeeking Alpha article:

Additional Material Business Beyond Apple

Tom Gutierrez Q3 2013 Conference Call

I'm not sure what else. I mean, the movement to more materials business -- we have an extraordinary technical team, and we have an extraordinarily talented management team with a lot of experience prior to GT in the materials world, and we're going to obviously be adding additional talent. And our end objective is to have a very viable and robust equipment business alongside a materials business that provides that base from which to grow on. And we've talked about the markets that we are interested in. We're interested in the downstream LED industry. We're interested in the power electronics industry. A lot of the things that we work on are green technologies, technologies intended to enable green power use or green power generation. And so, beyond that -- and as you know, Hyperion has many, many applications in those areas. Beyond that, there's not much else that I can tell you.

Power Electronics Materials Business

A great place to get information about Power Electronics is by looking at the Applied Power Electronics Conference And Exposition (APEC) 2014 conference overview. APEC will be meeting next week and below I have listed (below) some of their discussions, products, as well as applications, that will be covered during the conference. GT has mentioned in the past that they would like to go after medical applications, sputtering targets, space applications and thermoelectric converters for hybrid electric cars. If you look at GT's most recent corporate overview it seems to indicate that GT is fixated on power systems for electric vehicles (page 4 of corporate overview).

Technical paper subjects selected by experts from industry and academia covering power converter design and applications, inverters, thermal modeling, magnetic components, motor drives, LED lighting, and vehicular electronics.

Among the 80 industry session subjects will be industrial power, alternative energy, nanotechnology, vehicle power, wide bandgap devices and packaging.

The power electronics industry will rely heavily on Silicon Carbide (Sic) to replace Silicon (SI) which has been pushed to its technological performance limitations. SiC is needed across power electronics in order to improve efficiencies, size of equipment and performance of power electronics. SiC is a wide band-gap semiconductor and the benefits of using SiC in power electronics is tremendous. The issue has always been the cost of processing and fabricating SiC material. If you haven't learned anything yet, then it's time to start paying attention. GT is the company with the best technology around and they know exactly how to cut cuts to drive technology adoption.
Graphene Material Supplier for Tesla's Lithium-Ion Giga Factory

Telsa Motors (NASDAQ:TSLA) announced a few weeks that it intends to spend $5B on a new plant to build batteries for its next-generation of electric vehicles. Tesla's goal is to build a plant that can produce enough batteries for 500,000 cars a year by 2020. The 500,000 unit sales target has been around for since 2013. For comparison, in 2013 Tesla sold just over 25,000 cars and driving up annual sales to 500,000 units is significant jump in sales and a lot of electric vehicle batteries compared to 2013 levels. If Tesla really wants to improve the current batteries in the market today and they want to develop state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries, then the key ingredient is graphene. Northwestern University engineers in 2011 found that graphene electrodes can improve battery storage of lithium-ion batteries by 10 times and charge 10 times faster and last longer as well. Tesla wants to improve the range of their vehicles and having a super charged lithium-ion battery featuring a graphene electrode will do the job and then some.

Graphene is a two-dimensional (2D) material with exceptional properties, such as ultra high electrical and thermal conductivities, wide-range optical transmittance and excellent mechanical strength and flexibility. These properties make it a promising material for emerging and existing applications in printed & flexible circuitry, ultra fast transistors, touch screens, advanced batteries and supercapacitors, ultra fast lasers, photodetectors and many other non-electronic applications. One of the biggest problems is graphene is being able to produce graphene with high and consistent quality at acceptable costs.

GT has stated that their silicon carbide process paired with Hyperion Technology can produce thin silicon carbide lamina at the fraction of the cost of wafers cost today. The interesting thing about silicon carbide is that it can produce graphene! According to I-Micronews, "graphene materials can be produced as tiny flakes (nanoplatelets) or in the form of a large-size sheet on different substrates, such as a metal foil or silicon carbide (SiC)".

Furthermore, I-Micronews states that; "The catalytic chemical vapor deposition (NYSE:CVD) of graphene on metals, featuring the high potential for both scalability and high material quality, has the largest potential for mass production of graphene opto and electronic devices. Although the market potential of high-quality epitaxial graphene on SiC is limited by the dimensions and high costs of SiC wafers, it may be successfully applied to produce some high-end electronic applications. The nanoplatelets produced by different methods, such as liquid phase epitaxy or reduction of graphene oxide can be used to produce conductive inks for printed electronics and additive materials for energy storage devices, such as Li-ion batteries and supercapacitors".

If GT can produce SiC wafers at a cost significantly below the current market price they are also equally ahead of the competition to provide graphene, a byproduct of SiC, to Tesla for their $5B lithium-ion Giga Factory battery build out.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/2083553-gt-advanced-technologies-severely-misunderstood-and-undervalued-by-wall-street-analysts