Comment by morphle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by morphle | Hacker News Reader

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"We" is my small 20 year old Metamorph Research Institute and our spinoff companies Morphle Inc and Fiberhood Coöperation. Apologies, my websites are down and I still need to publish the science papers on the tiny MPPT chips and microcontrollers. We also design the largest chips [1] and I build Enernet microgrids [2] based on our chips.

We are chip designers and made a 1 dollar cent 64 bit 8 core microprocessor with MPPT and bidirectional buck/boost flyback inverters built-in. This nanoinverter can take the <0.5V of a single solar cell and convert it to (for example) 6V. Because these nanoinverters are networked over the DC conducters to each other, they can aggregate their output voltage to 48V, 110V or much higher so the conductors become much thinner. With all the power transistors, opamps, capacitors and diodes integrated into the chip you save more than $50 on discreet component MPPT and microinverters per panel while also boosting the MPPT per cell thus mitigating almost all shading losses.

The same chip can also charge/discharge (lithium and other) batteries. You can get 20 times more cycling charges out of Li-ion this way but you also save on the charging inverters. A single nano-inverter chip can take the output of one or more solar cells and charge li-ion cell, saving you half the number of nano-inverter chip in a total system.

I still need $50K investment to start the mass production of the new model 180nm chips, that will drop the manufacturing cost to 1 cent. Sadly Ycombinator won't fund me as they dislike single founders and dislike funding hardware startups.If you know anyone who can help us with sales or funding please send me an email.

A competitor already manufactors solar panels with microinverters for strings of cells (6-8 per panel) but their panels cost so much more that it is not worth it. Our nanoinvertors are two orders of magnitude cheaper.

[1] https://vimeo.com/731037615

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...

> We are chip designers and made a 1 dollar cent 64 bit 8 core microprocessor with MPPT and bidirectional buck/boost flyback inverters built-in.

Attaching an MCU to an inverter isn’t exactly new technology. It’s not clear why you need a bidirectional buck/boost for solar, let alone an 8-core 64-bit MCU on every cell.

Do you have any technology that couldn’t be replicated by another chip designer company by combining their IP blocks and sending it through their fab queue?

The problem with a “1 cent” chip (or $0.04 or a dollar depending on which comment I read) is that it’s a negligible part of the overall cost. The price of the packaging, magnetics, testing, and integration into the panel will eclipse that by orders of magnitude. If a single-founder company could do it with only $50K investment, then any of the big players could have done it years ago unless you’re in possession of some patents that can’t be worked around.

The above claims of producing “30% more” energy also don’t hold up, given that it would require current systems to be less than 77% efficient (a number that was surpassed long ago)

>Attaching an MCU to an inverter isn’t exactly new technology

No, its nothing special. Texas Instruments, Analog Devices and many others sell such chips for decades for several dollars each. What makes our chips (Microcontroller SoC) special is the $0,01 price and the high speed network between them so you can aggregate/balance/coordinate the inverter output voltage and the fully programmable inverter with all components in the chip except the inductor (a small coil).

The bidirectional buck/boost is to charge/discharge battery cells individually, for solar cells we just need a unidirectional boost inverter.

>8-core 64-bit MCU Sorry for the confusion, I could not edit my mistake. It is an single core 64 bit processor (ARM, X-86, Risc-V, bytecode and microcode) but reconfigurable to 8x8bit (for I/O processors like the RP2040 Raspberry pico), 4x16bit or 2x32bit or combinations like 4x8bit plus 1x32bit). The reconfiguration of the 8 bit slices is done with our special kind of FPGA fabric that we call Morphle Logic [1]

>Do you have any technology that couldn’t be replicated?

Only special physics knowledge. Our software. But nothing that they could not reverse engineer in a few weeks.

>then any of the big players could have done it years ago

Yes they could and they have. Their designs are pretty bad though, especially the microcontroller parts. And they just charge way too much for them. The Chinese companies that make the panels have not yet cloned their chips.

>a negligible part of the overall cost. The price of the packaging, magnetics, testing

Wrong. Our package is the cheapest with just two or 6 solder balls on the bare die, no package no pins. Testing, magnetics are no factor.

>and integration into the panel will eclipse that No, the chips are in the place where the solar cell wires attach to each other already, the silicon sliver of material makes the standard wireing slightly cheaper.

>claims of producing “30% more” energy also don’t hold up

This is rounded estimated number from several science papers about maximum MPPT yield improvements and separately from wiring cells in parallel. Its certainly not my claim, to calculate this number scientifically you have to do this for every individual cell and panel on every different geographic location.

[1] https://github.com/fiberhood/MorphleLogic/blob/main/README_M...

Do you have a spec sheet for your MPPT chip that you can share? The white paper and video presentation that you linked appear to be completely unrelated.

I am writing the datasheet for the reconfigurable MPPT bidirectional buck/boost flyback invertor microcontroller SoC chips as we speak [1]. Do you have an email I can send it to?

The older white paper is very much related, it describes the large power router chips, the MPPT nano-invertor microcontroller chips for individual solar cells are just a recent adddition to our system of line chips.

The video presentation is about the wafer scale integration, a million core giant version of the same microprocessor as the tiny MPPT chips, so they are very much related.

[1] Morphle MNI003 datasheet:

input voltage: 0.01V-6.01V (solar cell or battery input)

output voltage: 0.6V-12V (aggregated or single output)

can power up from solar cell or battery, 0,02W

External inductor (30-100 μH) needed.

Builtin 8 opamps, 4 power mosfets, 3 capacitors, 3 diodes

Forms a programmable reconfigurable MPPT inverter or a Li-ion (all 6 chemistries) battery charger and discharger.

180 Mhz 64 Bit Microprocessor made from 8 bit ALU slices. Can be configured at runtime as 8 x 8b it, 4 x 16 bit, 2 x 32 bit and 1 x 64 bit processors. Microcode processor executes X86-64, ArmV8, Risc-V instructions and Python and Squeak bytecodes natively.

4K OTP memory

16K SRAM

SPI interface to external flash

one-wire network over power input and output wire two-wire 10baseT ethernet to wire all inverters into networks up to 10240 microcontrollers

networked MNI003 chips can aggregate output voltages up to 240V DC

Thanks; I'm working on products in this area and not especially satisfied by the parts available. Especially as Analog seems to be abandoning their micro-MPPT IC product line. My email is jacob at jbaylessconsulting dot ca.

One of the common issues with solar micro-MPPT is EMI emissions. Have you tested for compliance with emitted radio-frequency noise standards?

Yes and no. If you run the inverters or network at 100Khz up to 1 Mhz you get much different EMI than if you run them at 1 Khz. The inductor and ADC also play a role. We will know this only after we mass produce the chip, my test chips and prototypes (with RP2040 and Padauk PMS150) have similar but not the same EMI emissions.

- We could package the chip, for example wrap it entirely with the metal inductor. That works as a faraday cage and block the emissions. But will this raise the price?

- You put the chip between the solar cell and the (flat) wires. That works as a faraday cage and block the emissions. Will the solar panel maker do this?

- You could have solar cells without the panel, think fo a CD size solar cell encased in plastic just as a CD is a metal foil encased in plastic. Now you can wrap the chip and block the emissions. You can hang the cell from the wires (in a tree or on the distribution wire like christmas lights)

I forgot to mention a single chip has three inverters in it for three solar cells or batteries or a combination of two cells and one battery.

There are 6 ADC's on board.

The 8 bit cores are very much like the I/O processors of the RP2040 Raspberry Pico chip

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