The company's technology gained early industry recognition with the presentation of a Small Times Magazine award at a leading nanotech business event in 2005. Technical details of Nanosolar's manufacturing techniques have been disclosed in patent applications. Some information about their process became available in a Scientific American article (in German). These details involved a semiconductor ink that it claimed would enable it to produce solar cells with a basic printing process, rather than using slow and expensive high-vacuum based thin-film deposition processes. The ink was deposited on a flexible substrate (the “paper”), and then nanocomponents in the ink aligned themselves properly via molecular self-assembly.