The 52 year-old technology pioneering company, Energy Conversion Devices (ECD), has filed for Chapter 11 after an ill-starred foray into solar energy generation.
Founded in 1960 by legendary inventor Stan Ovshinsky, ECD was best known for its Ovonics Unified Memory (OUM) based on phase-change techniques. Many of the world’s leading memory companies licensed the technology, but none produced a mainstream OUM memory.
Intel co-founders Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore worked on OUM with Ovshinsky and Gordon Moore co-authored with Ron Neale an article about phase-change memory in Electronics magazine in 1970.
Ovshinsky started his solar business, called United Solar Ovonic, in 1990 to produce thin-film solar laminates for industrial and commercial buildings. He built four factories but the business went sour three years ago and ECD lost over $765m in 2010 and 2011.
It is expected that the business will be sold as a going concern free of debts as a result of the Chapter 11 proceedings.
ECD has also sold Ovonic Battery to BASF for $58m
Ovshinsky, who will be 90 years old in November, has 400 patents from a sting of inventions in a wide variety of fields including batteries, displays, memories and fuel cells.
