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A solar cell is created from silicon wafers through a multi-stage, intricate, and highly specialised process. At each stage, a different piece of machinery is employed, such as sensors, temperature controls, clean room and clean blow products, actuators, vacuums, and others.
From wafer inspection to solar cell final testing, quality control and the production environment are also crucial.
The first step in the cell production process is to inspect the silicon wafers for metrics such as surface roughness, minority lifespan, resistivity, microcrack, and others.
At this point, automatic loading and unloading systems, as well as system integration and detection modules, are frequently used. At the wet station, all impurities and blemishes are cleaned away to provide a flawless surface.
To create a micro-rough surface and expand the light-receptive area, texturing is then done using random pyramid texturing, inverted pyramid texturing, or photolithography. After that, the surface is acid cleaned to eliminate any post-texturing particle residue.
When silicon wafers are put through a diffusion coating furnace, a dopant, such as boron, phosphorus, or even gallium, is added to make the silicon more electrically conductive.
To remove the dopant that has diffused not only into the targeted wafer surface but also around the edges and on the backside, plasma etching and edge isolation using tetrafluoromethane gas must be performed.
Before an anti-reflective (AR) coating (silicon nitride or titanium oxide) can be put on the wafers, they must also be washed to remove the remnants of the prior etching operation.
Plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition is the most used technique for applying AR coating (PECVD). A thin, gaseous coating that is coated and cemented onto the wafer is produced by PECVD equipment.
To make ohmic connections, metal pastes are first screen printed on the wafer’s back side and subsequently on its front side. The dried metal pastes are then solidified onto the wafers in a sintering furnace to create solar cells. The manufactured solar cells are then examined for various characteristics under simulated sunshine conditions.
The Global Solar Cell Silicon Wafer Inspection Equipment market accounted for $XX Billion in 2021 and is anticipated to reach $XX Billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of XX% from 2024 to 2030.
The most sophisticated fully automated bare wafer inspection instrument for the manufacture of crystalline silicon photovoltaic wafers and cells is the Applied Vericell Solar Wafer Inspection System.
The many integrated inspection modules of the Applied Vericell system automatically assess each wafer to identify and remove defective wafers from production, yielding significant manufacturing savings.
The Wafer Thickness, Thickness Variations, Warp, and Resistivity are just a few of the many metrics that the Vericell measures and reports on. Vericell also picks up saw marks, chipped edges, damaged chamfers, stains, pinholes, and microcracks among other flaws.
Solar cells are transported using silicon wafer. Testing the incoming silicon wafer is crucial since the quality of the silicon wafer directly affects the conversion efficiency of the solar cell.
This method is primarily employed for the online measurement of a few silicon wafer technical parameters, including surface roughness, minority lifespan, resistivity, P/N type, and microcrack, among others.
The apparatus consists of four sensing modules, wafer transmission, automatic loading and unloading, and system integration.
The photovoltaic silicon wafer detector is one of them and measures the silicon wafer’s surface roughness as well as its size and diagonal line, among other appearance-related factors.
The silicon wafer’s interior microcracks are found using the microcrack detection module. There are also two detection modules: one is an online testing module used primarily to test wafer resistivity and wafer type, and the other is intended to evaluate the minority life of silicon wafers.
The diagonal and microcrack of the silicon wafer should be identified before the measurement of minority lifetime and resistivity, and the damaged silicon wafer should be automatically destroyed.
In order to increase testing accuracy and efficiency, the wafer testing equipment can automatically load and unload the wafer and can fix unqualified items in place.
