Last week's news that Applied Materials had agreed to buy Applied Films caught some by surprise. The Longmont, CO--based thin-film deposition equipment company owns a piece of the solar-cell tool action, so the purchase represents a new market play for the semiconductor OEM giant. But at least one observer in the blogosphere found indications that solar was heating up at AMAT before news of the acquisition hit the wires.

Neal Dikeman, one of the bloggers at www.cleantechblog.com, posted a piece on April 11 with the headline, Is Applied Materials Entering the Solar Equipment Manufacturing Business?

Neal says he got a tip from a friend about AMAT's interest in the solar-cell sector, although there was no mention of anything about the semiconductor equipment giant acquiring existing companies to help build a new business unit. Since he couldn't get confirmation at the time, he did some digging on job sites and patent databases on the Web and came up with a fairly compelling case that AMAT seemed to be up to something. As it turned out, he might not have been right on the money, but he was definitely darn close.

Given the prodigious double-digit growth foreseen in the photovoltaic solar-cell market, AMAT is not the first nor certainly will it be the last chipmaking tool and materials company to leverage its silicon and other thin-film process and manufacturing expertise to diversify into that sector. Certainly MEMC (who recently signed a long-term deal with Motech, a leading solar-cell producer in Taiwan, worth a reported $1.6 billion) and other silicon-wafer manufacturers as well as the polysilicon suppliers have already benefitted from the surge in solar.