DGAP-News

centrotherm photovoltaics AG: centrotherm process and production solutions provide solar cell manufacturers with significant cost reductions and flexibility for tomorrow's cell concepts

DGAP-News: centrotherm photovoltaics AG / Key word(s): Miscellaneous
centrotherm photovoltaics AG: centrotherm process and production
solutions provide solar cell manufacturers with significant cost
reductions and flexibility for tomorrow's cell concepts

13.05.2014 / 10:56

---------------------------------------------------------------------

centrotherm process and production solutions provide solar cell
manufacturers with significant cost reductions and flexibility for
tomorrow's cell concepts
- Low-pressure diffusion creates precondition for industrial
manufacturing of high-quality emitters

- Highly-efficient bifacial n-type silicon solar cells in mass production


- PECVD process for aluminum oxide coating

Blaubeuren, May 13, 2014 - Both continued cost pressure and the necessity
for efficiency improvements will comprise the main topics at next week's
SNEC PV Power Expo trade fair in Shanghai. Here, centrotherm will be
presenting its solutions that offer solar cell manufacturers expedient
options to reduce their production costs as well as boosting process
flexibility for tomorrow's cell and production concepts.

Convincing results with centrotherm low-pressure phosphorus diffusion
With its highly productive low-pressure diffusion system, centrotherm is
enabling its customers to attain cost savings of up to 40 % per wafer. This
is achieved through almost doubled system throughput of more than 140 MW
per year and lower media consumption. Even in the case of emitter
resistances of up to 150 Ω/square, customers achieve outstanding
homogeneity, and can fully exploit efficiency potentials of both
conventional and new metallization pastes (emitter resistance > 100
Ω/square). The centrotherm low-pressure technology opens up a broad
corridor for new diffusion processes for solar cell manufacturers,
especially through the fast and changing deployment of gases in the process
tube. Currently, centrotherm low-pressure diffusion systems are already
installed in mass production with a total capacity of more than 1.2
gigawatts (GW).

Low-pressure boron diffusion
In a joint project with the International Solar Energy Research Center
(ISC) in Constance, centrotherm is developing a new low-pressure process
for highly efficient boron doping. This enables efficiency enhancement and
production cost reduction for n-type solar cells, especially through the
integration of upstream and downstream process steps and shorter process
times.

New cell concepts for mass production: "BiSoN Alliance" with ISC Constance
for bifacial n-type solar cells
Together with ISC Constance and SIBCO, centrotherm is offering process and