Last week we looked at the fascinating innovations taking place in microprocessors, with industry-leading Intel Corp. taking design and function to new levels. Are you ready for 80-core chips with substantial built-in memory?

Technology commentators and consumers tend to focus on the computer — and its rapidly evolving components — because of its central place in the information revolution. We sometimes miss other important trends in adjacent fields.

I was lucky — or unlucky to be sleepless at 4 in the morning — to catch a broadcast session of the Commonwealth Club of California as it hosted guest speaker Mike Splinter, president and chief executive officer of Applied Materials.

This Silicon-Valley-based company may be known best for building the machines that produce the microchips we use in our computers, and no doubt as the industry moves forward toward those heady days of 80-core chips, Intel and AMD will look to Applied Materials to make the machines that will produce them.

Mike Splinter’s talk at the Commonwealth Club, however, was not focused on microchips. It turns out that the very kind technology used to produce those 50-inch, flat-panel TVs that are taking over our living room — the manufacturing system for which was also developed by Applied Materials — can be used in the production of photovoltaic cells, the key device for solar energy capture.

Splinter obviously believes in the future of solar energy. The key to its success lies in a number of things, not the least of which is the desire for adoption. Recent awareness of the potential catastrophe brought on by global warming heightens the need to move away from electricity produced by coal and natural gas.

Are Americans, though, ready to pay a premium to contribute to saving our planet? Mr. Splinter wonders about that, as do all of us who fear Americans may be too shortsighted to heed the warnings.

Which is why, Splinter said, reducing the unit cost of solar-generated electricity will be key. Applied Materials may be able to offer solutions. As a matter of fact, the company’s Web site is currently topped by an announcement of a joint venture by two German companies, Good Energy and NorSun, to be named Sunfilm AG that will manufacture “the world’s first 5.7m2 tandem thin film photovoltaic modules on glass substrates on a production line supplied by Applied Materials.”

Here’s where the connection to TV flat panels come in. Flat-panel production also involves laying film or coating on glass or plastic. Applied Materials, apparently, is simply applying one technology to the service of another.

The secret to reducing the cost-per-watt may lie in tandem cell technology, in which an amorphous silicon top film absorbs short wavelengths of light while a microcrystalline silicon bottom layer absorbs longer wavelengths, leading to greater efficiencies.

That may lead the world toward carbon-free — and safe — energy production.

Two pieces remain to solving the solar-energy puzzle: tying widespread building-by-building solar-energy production to the national electric grid, as well as finding storage solutions using batteries and fuel cells.

Mike Splinter thought success may rest in rapidly improving fuel-cell technology. I surely hope so. The planet may depend on it.