What’s Your Solar Story?

Officially, SEMICON West has more than 250 exhibitors that have offerings for both the photovoltaics and the semiconductor markets. But it seems that nearly every exhibitor has some sort of solar story to tell.

Aaron Hand, Executive Editor, Electronic Media -- Semiconductor International, 7/17/2008

This year, SEMICON West is co-located with the inaugural Intersolar North America show, whose exhibits can be found on Level 3 of Moscone West. But as you walk through the other levels of the West, North and South halls, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an exhibitor who isn’t trying to get a piece of that great big solar pie. Officially, SEMICON West has more than 250 exhibitors that have offerings for both the photovoltaics and the semiconductor markets. But it seems that nearly every exhibitor has some sort of solar story to tell. What follows is just a tiny sampling of what’s being highlighted on the show floor.

Solar cell surface cleaner — Mallinckrodt Baker Inc. (Phillipsburg, N.J.), which manufactures high-purity chemicals for microelectronics, among other industries, reports that the demand for its BakerClean PV-160 solar cell surface cleaner has grown so rapidly that it plans to double the manufacturing capacity for the product. As part of the expansion plan, the company will begin manufacture of the cleaning solution in its high-volume facility in Paris, Ky., while increasing existing manufacturing capacity at its facility in Deventer, Netherlands.

Slicing solar wafers — Synova (Lausanne, Switzerland), whose water jet-guided laser technology has been used for more than 10 years in the volume production of semiconductors, has been working in the photovoltaics space for about a year and a half. The company’s latest news, released earlier this month, announced a multi-system order from a European solar cell manufacturer for its Laser MicroJet modules, which will be used to cut the venture’s 125 and 156 mm polysilicon octagonal tubes into solar wafers.

Synova, whose Laser MicroJet has been dicing semiconductor wafers for more than 10 years, has recently taken its technology to solar cell manufacturing.

Harsh process vacuum pumps — Edwards (Crawley, UK), which supplies vacuum and abatement equipment and services, has introduced a new version of its next-generation iXH series of harsh process vacuum pumps targeted for solar manufacturing applications. The product is designed to meet the solar industry’s need to pump large volumes of hydrogen during solar cell manufacturing processes, and it meets the need for both crystalline silicon and thin-film solar cell manufacturing. The semiconductor industry has an opportunity to bring some “green” leadership to the solar industry, noted Sia Abbaszadeh, head of Edwards’ solar and FPD business.

Metallization line — Although the tool running in the booth for DEK International (Flemington, N.J.) highlights its latest packaging innovations, the video running next to it points to the company’s latest solar activities, including its solar metallization line running at BTU’s Solar Lab in Shanghai. Darren Brown, DEK’s alternative energy business development manager, commented on the excitement among employees on getting into a business that helps the environment.

The S in CIGS — Matheson Tri-Gas (Newark, Calif.) is the first gas supplier to work with Sematech (Austin, Texas) in its Albany NanoTech efforts, and chief technologist Terry Francis talked excitedly of the semiconductor work going on there. But the company also has its solar story to tell, which is the ramp-up of H₂Se production for CIGS solar cells in both Tennessee and Korea. Although several gas companies are providing silane and NF₃ to the PV industry, noted Kevin Finn, executive vice president and general manager of the Electronic Gas Group, H₂Se, where the CIGS cell converts photons to electrons was an area that Matheson Tri-Gas felt they could bring something new to the table.

TCAD for photovoltaics — Synopsys Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) has been providing modeling software to the photovoltaics industry for years, but the company is at a point where it is really trying to get the word out to the industry, according to Ric Borges, senior product marketing manager. The EDA company’s TCAD simulation helps a range of photovoltaics technologies pursue the push to higher efficiencies.

Connecting to the grid — Advanced Energy Industries (Fort Collins, Colo.) has grown its power supplies for semiconductor wafer sputtering and deposition into larger systems for glass coating, eventually converting the technology into a system large enough to act as a solar inverter, which changes the DC power that comes from solar panels into the AC power needed to connect to a grid. Advanced Energy has what it says is the highest-efficiency inverter in the industry, providing a 97% efficiency vs. 94-95% from competitors. Although that’s only a couple percentage points, that efficiency is money, emphasized Todd Miklos.

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