There’s a lot of talk about making power meters and the electric grid “smart” enough to handle additional energy from solar panels. National Semiconductor wants to make the solar panels themselves smarter. They’ve developed a chip that integrates into the junction boxes of solar panels, optimizing power production.

National Semi calls it SolarMagic. The technology was released over a year ago, but was only available as an add-on and only now is it integrable. SolarMagic helps minimize a major problem for solar panels: shading. When just a few solar cells within a panel become shaded, it can cause failure in the entire string of cells and reduce output for the whole solar array. SolarMagic chips are designed to adjust the voltage and current of the panels in that array to assure that they are all the same, increasing overall power output.

The chip also works like a smart meter by collecting information and data on system performance, then relaying it over the internet for easy monitoring.

Sun Edison retrofitted SolarMagic chip sets into one of its existing installations and reportedly found that performance increased by 20 percent. According to National Semiconductor, the first new panels with integrated SolarMagic chips — costing 12 cents per watt — will be unveiled at the Intersolar Europe conference next week in Munich, Germany.

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