Solar Spurs Exceptional Growth

Owens Design, a design and manufacturing partner for the solar, semiconductor, and data storage industries has announced that bookings from new tool design and manufacturing contracts with companies in the solar market have increased by 152 percent in the past year. This increase in market penetration highlights the cost and time-to-production advantages gained by solar product manufacturers when collaborating with Owens Design on new capital equipment design and development.

"This significant growth in Owens Design's solar business is a testament to our success in enabling the introduction of new solar manufacturing technologies in this important emerging market," said John Apgar, President of Owens Design. "It also demonstrates the strength of the expanding solar market in relation to how the downturn has impacted most other technology sectors. The collaborative design and manufacture of solar tools is a large growth market for us."

Collaborative capital equipment development and manufacture offers next generation solar companies an alternate solution when an off-the-shelf equipment solution does not exist.  Over the years, Owens Design has developed a proven methodology that reduces tool development costs, minimizes technical risk, maximizes platform performance and reduces the time to volume production for their customers. By working closely with Owens Design, a solar product company can focus its efforts on developing their core technology, while Owens' experienced team of tool development engineers focuses on integrating this new technology into a platform that has been optimized to meet their performance specifications.

Along with the new and growing solar equipment market, Owens Design has organized a team of dedicated design and manufacturing experts who average over 20 years of capital equipment industry experience.  Whether the requirement is for multi-layer thin film (i.e. CdTe, CIGS) or crystalline silicon substrate based processes, Owens Design can provide the high efficiency and high yield manufacturing equipment needed to produce product for the lowest cost per watt.

"At Owens Design, we average between 12 and 15 new tool design and development programs per year," said Mark Danna, Owens Design's VP of Sales and Marketing. "As a result, we have a highly experienced engineering team and an established 'design and build' infrastructure that has allowed us to refine the collaborative development process. Because of this collaboration, our customers' engineering staffs can focus on developing new manufacturing processes that will establish their companies as technology leaders in their respective markets. By helping them to minimize the risk, cost, and time involved in bringing those new processes into production we play a critical role in enabling that technology leadership."