Date: 27/01/2013

Intevac to ship its Ion Implant equipment to a solar PV customer in 1Q2013

While solar PV industry is undergoing a massive business and technology transformation, the two most happening trends are increasing effeciency of Solar PV above 22% for silicon based solar cells, and to develop non-silicon type low cost, easy to make solar PV such as organic Solar PV, so finally cost per watt has to come down.

In the domain of silicon solar PV, industry is opting ion implanting process for uniform and precision doping of the semiconductor material. Solar PV equipment maker Intevac has developed Ion Implant systems called "Ion Implant ENERGi system". Company has confirmed it has received order for this equipment and is scheduled to ship in the first quarter of 2013 to a large Asian solar cell manufacturer.

Intevac claims its compact ion implant ENERGi system meets the cost, efficiency and productivity requirements of solar cell manufacturing.

This equipment helps improve emitter profiles for higher cell efficiency and tighter distribution and handles high throughput at 2400 wafers per hour (P and N-type).

To learn further on the technology read the white paper titled "Ion implantation for silicon solar cells" written by Henry Hieslmair, Ian Latchford, Lisa Mandrell, Moon Chun & Babak Adibi of Intevac. The white paper is available at
http://www.intevac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Intevac%20authored%20paper.pdf
Author: Srinivasa Reddy N