SERIS Orders Lab-to-Fab Tool From SoLayTec

The Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS) has purchased a Process Development Tool (PDT) from SoLayTec to raise efficiencies for industrial solar cell designs. By sealing this contract, SoLayTec's ultrafast atomic layer deposition (ALD) of aluminium oxide Al2O3 will be applied at a large selection of research institutes in the world of PV industry.

Research institute SERIS, metalorganics material supplier AkzoNobel and equipment supplier SoLayTec will have a three year research contract on the integration of Al2O3 into new cell concepts.

Dr Bram Hoex, Director of the Silicon Photovoltaics Cluster at the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS), National University of Singapore (NUS) says, "As a pioneer in the application of atomic layer deposition (ALD) for high-efficiency silicon wafer solar cells, I am very happy to work with SoLayTec to bring ALD to the next level. The crystalline silicon surface passivation by ALD-grown aluminium oxide films has enabled very high solar cell efficiencies on lab-scale reactors, and we are very excited to see that companies are now bringing ALD from laboratory scale to mass production scale. The spatial ALD approach developed by SoLayTec offers ALD at unprecedented deposition rates (up to 1.0 nm/s) on a single side of a silicon substrate, without sacrificing any of the unique properties of ALD. We are confident that our collaboration with SoLayTec will lead to very high efficiencies for large-area silicon wafer solar cells, for several solar cell designs under development at SERIS."

The contract with the Singapore-based research institute SERIS will allow SoLayTec more access to the market in Asia. Roger Görtzen, Dip. Ing the co-founder, marketing and sales manager of SoLayTec, says, "At this moment we do the sampling for our Asian customers in our European headquarters. After the installation of our process development tool at SERIS, which is fully equipped for the pilot-scale production of solar cells, we are able to accelerate research and demonstrate our technology to our customers in Asia."

In parallel SoLayTec is designing and testing their High Volume Tool (HVT), to be launched Q4 of this year. With this production tool in place, the lab-to-fab roadmap will be ready for Al2O3. The throughput of this tool is highly scalable, which means that with low investments, cell manufacturers can start small and upgrade the throughput at a later stage. The HVT will have the highest flexibility regarding throughput, uptime and layer thickness and of course the lowest cost of ownership for Al2O3 in the market.