Overview of lift-off technologies for kerfless crystalline silicon material for PV applications

CHEETAH Webinar

One of the key drivers in wafer-based c-Si PV world is the increasingly efficient use of silicon, primarily as a means to reduce costs per Watt-peak (Wp) and per unit area. As a result of this, there has been an explosion of research and development, starting in the late 1990s, in the area of lift-off and layer transfer techniques aimed at producing ultra-thin films of crystalline silicon as a replacement for standard thick crystalline silicon wafers. In a cost-sensitive PV industry, these lift-off methods could enable strong cost reductions by (1) allowing production of ultra-thin wafers (a factor of 3-4 thinner than today’s wafer) (2) short-cutting several energy-intensive processes in the wafer production value chain, and (3) enabling kerfless wafer production.

This webinar offers a general overview of all technologies developed worldwide for producing kerfless silicon material and  will zoom in on the approach and the results obtained in Cheetah so far.

Foils of 80 µm up to 120 µm are grown in an in-line high-throughput CVD reactor and 50 µm layers are grown in a reference single-wafer CVD tool.  Handling during the different processing steps becomes an important issue when dealing with very thin wafers.  Therefore, a first yield study is made for very thin wafers in a semi-industrial line and first process adaptations are proposed for manual handling of 50 µm foils

Informations

Contacts to get more information on this event:

Dr.	Kris Van Nieuwenhuisen	IMEC
Dr	Kartsen Bittkau,	FZ-Jülich
Dr.	Franco Roca,	ENEA

 

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CHEETAH Webinar team

Agenda

Time	Title	Speakers
14:00 - 14:05	Introduction	BANSEN Roman
Roman Bansen, IKZ-Berlin  will chair the event and will contribute during the webinar with activities realized in IKZ BANSEN Roman Introduction (slides) Introduction (FLV Video) Introduction (MP4 Video) PV Technologies : Ultra-thin and kerfless silicon wafer development Tags : Kerf-less and wafer-equivalent manufacturing
14:05 - 14.45	Overview of technologies for producing kerfless silicon material	SIVARAMAKRISHNAN Hariharsudan
The first part of this webinar offers an overview of lift-off technologies, spanning decades of research into (sometimes wild) ideas that could revolutionise the wafer production value chain one day.  SIVARAMAKRISHNAN Hariharsudan PV Technologies : Ultra-thin and kerfless silicon wafer development
14:45 - 15:15	Approach and the results obtained in Cheetah Project in kerfless silicon material	VAN NIEUWENHUISEN Kris
The second part of the webinar, reports  on the results obtained in the CHEETAH project fabricated using the layer transfer process based on a porous silicon weak layer.  VAN NIEUWENHUISEN Kris PV Technologies : Ultra-thin and kerfless silicon wafer development
15:15 - 15:30	Questions & Comments