Monday, March 20, 2006

Solaicx - Photovoltaic Silicon Crystal Mavens


Pullers / Growers and Slicers of single crystal silicon Par Extraordinaire !

This hardy battle tested crew is doing useful commercial improvements to both the CZ puller and thin wafer slicing to reduce costs of high mobility single crystal silicon wafers with high volumetric utilization of boule silicon and improved process uptime for the crystal puller.

Key in their IP from a silicon crystal puller expert of the name Bender(an inventor for the firm), is that they have devised a means to stabilize the CZ puller with a near continuous feed replenishment of the melt, without disturbing the melt interface (nor displacing the surface) and identified useful methods to enable thinner wafer slicing for high yield production, by mechanically stabilizing the wafer and and saw blade.

Seemingly mundane technology, but important for thin wafer production desired for lower costs in high performance solar cell manufacture. ( ie if you are going to do high performance high volume cost effective cells, it has to be single crystal silicon for the foreseeable future - as Sunpower among others, seem to know well)








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