Sydney, Australia--BT Imaging Pty Ltd (BTi), supplier of luminescence-based inspection and quality control systems for solar photovoltaic manufacturing has introduced a multi-function inspection and analysis system that’s designed to significantly speed failure analysis and sampling in photovoltaic (PV) cell production.
The system uses laser-based luminescence imaging technology originally developed at the Centre of Excellence for Advanced Silicon Photovoltaics and Photonics at the University of New South Wales. Earlier this year, Thorsten Trupke, BT Imaging's chief technical officer, and Robert Bardos, the company's vice president of research and development won the Berthold Leibinger Foundation 2010 Innovationspreis (Innovation Prize) for this work.]
The company claims its imaging-based LIS-P2 platform is a photovoltaic industry first, offering capabilities in a single tool that can replace the current operator-intensive practice of using four or more tools in the PV cell production line lab.
BTi says that solar cell manufacturers currently use several lab tools in the cell line for failure analysis. These typically include electroluminescence (EL), series resistance (RS), lifetime sensors, and so forth. The use of the current tool set is operator and time-intensive and has critical data limitations, according to the company. The existing lifetime tool, for instance, typically provides only an average lifetime number for the wafer and no spatial information, preventing operators from carrying out accurate diagnosis of process issues or sampling of process steps for quality. The series resistance tool that is used today is very slow and destroys the cell during measurement. As the industry moves towards higher efficiency cells, high-resolution imaging based information is going to be essential to drive better decision making in production.
The LIS-P2 platform offers photoluminescence, EL, RS, quasi steady state photo conductance (QSS-PC), and lifetime imaging capability in a single tool. It is available in two configurations and provides the cell line with the required data substantially faster than current tools, with higher resolution, with no sample damage, and without the need to load the samples on several different tools.
"The LIS-P2 platform is a direct response to our customers' need to increase solar cell production yield," stated Ian Maxwell, chief executive officer of BT Imaging. "We look forward to working with our customers to help them rapidly and accurately identify and diagnose production line problems."
The LIS-P2 platform will start shipping to beta customers in the fourth quarter of 2010. The system will be on display at the 25th EU PVSEC 2010 in Valencia, Spain from September 6 through September 9, 2010.
For more information go to www.btimaging.com.
Posted by: Steve Anderson
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