Date: 10-Jun-10
Country: FINLAND
Author: Tarmo Virki
 

The inventor of a new type of solar cell won the Finnish state and industry-funded Millennium Technology Prize, the prize's foundation said on Wednesday.

Michael Graetzel's dye-sensitized solar cells, known as "Graetzel cells," could be a significant contributor to the future energy technologies due to their excellent price-performance ratio, the Helsinki-based Millennium Prize Foundation said.

"Graetzel cells are likely to have an important role in low-cost, large-scale solutions for renewable energy," the foundation said.

The 800,000-euro ($1.07 million) prize is awarded once every two years for a specific and groundbreaking innovation that has a favorable impact on the quality of life and human wellbeing.

Graetzel is the fourth winner of the Millennium Prize, which was handed out for the first time in 2004 to Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

Finland hopes the Millennium award will eventually achieve the same recognition and status as the Nobel prizes, awarded in Sweden and Norway.

Cambridge University Professor Richard Friend -- who created new organic semiconductor components -- and computer engineering Professor Stephen Furber from University of Manchester were runners up, both winning 150,000-euro awards.

Furber was the principal designer of the ARM 32 bit RISC microprocessor, found in most handheld electronic devices and in more than 98 percent of the world's mobile phones.

"As an engineer I feel it is my job to make useful artifacts," Furber told Reuters.

"The world is quite big and it's quite hard to do something where you can see the impact so tangibly. Anywhere I go in the world I get on the train and there are more ARM processors than people, and people using ARM processors," he said.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)