原创 美国硅谷建立太阳能光伏研发中心

the Silicon Valley Photovoltaic Development Center (San Jose) launched today with a mission to be a development center for companies providing solar cells, modules, equipment, materials and factory automation, including services such as testing, certification, design and job training.

The center is a new business unit of SVTC Technologies LLC (San Jose), the semiconductor-related R&D provider that operates a pilot line facility in California and the former Sematech ATDF facility in Austin, Texas. Located in the Edenvale Redevelopment Project Area, the center will be housed in a 87,000 ft² facility, including a 30,000 ft² cleanroom. Corporate investment in the center is estimated at $20M-$30M thus far.

The center launches with two public partners, JA Solar Co. (Shanghai) and Roth & Rau AG (Hohenstein-Ernstthal, Germany), a maker of solar processing and automation equipment that saw its revenues triple last year to >$200M. R&R will provide eight production tools in the form of a 5 MW capacity turnkey silicon wafer solar cell manufacturing line for the center. The line will be used as a showroom and demonstration facility for the German company, as well as giving the center a pilot production line that will serve customers seeking to establish a solar cell production process.

The two founding partners will each send 10 engineers to the center in the first year. Other partners, including venture-backed solar start-ups that remain in stealth mode, have signed on as customers, and the center has received $100K in backing from the city of San Jose’s redevelopment agency and other funding from the state.

Kurt Laetz, SVTC Solar program manager

Kurt Laetz, SVTC Solar program manager, said, “The vision for this facility is for us to be the managing partner for a partnership of solar providers, to be a place where customers can come and have the entire suite of support services for their development efforts.”

Scott Marquardt, Vice President, SVTC Technologies

A core group of partners would work with the center to develop solar cell production processes, including testing and failure analysis, with another set of partners working in back-end module assembly. Those efforts would be supported by partners providing materials, cell design, factory design and other services. The San Jose center will focus most of its efforts on silicon wafer-based processes, with support for thin-film technologies to be announced later, said Scott Marquardt, vice president of sales and business development at SVTC.

The center may include an auditorium and dining facility so that solar-related conferences could be held there. Laetz said, “We would like this to be like the Fraunhofer Center in Europe, a world-recognized place where people can come.”

While the United States has a government-backed R&D center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL, Golden, Colo.), and universities such as the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta) have sophisticated solar labs, there has not been a commercially focused place for companies to test out equipment, process technologies, and other solar-related technologies. Indeed, Laetz said U.S. start-ups have been forced to go from one equipment supplier to the next in a “mish-mash way” to prove out process ideas. “There is a lack of demonstration lines that has surprised me,” Laetz said.

The center arrives on the scene amid exploding venture and corporate investments, Marquardt said. “Money is flowing in, smart people are bringing ideas. There is VC and government funding, and lots of ideas. There is an explosion in the approaches to solar cell development.”

Laetz said, “The context is that the U.S. need for electrical power is such that we have to grow capacity by 2% each year in order to have a healthy, growing economy. There is a strain on the resources to both generate and distribute energy, leading to brown-outs in California. Solar, being a distributive energy, helps solve the grid problem.”

The center is a major addition to SVTC, which has ~80,000 ft² of cleanroom, housing >200 process tools and supporting analytic capabilities. About 350 people work for SVTC, with “another 100+ engineers on our site from our semiconductor development partners,” Marquardt said.

The knowledge gained by SVTC in developing semiconductor-related processes and materials will be brought to bear on the solar challenge, where intellectual property (IP) protection is also key. “We make it possible for people to work in confidentiality without exposing their intellectual property to others,” he said.

Laetz said the R&R equipment will support the basic silicon wafer-based solar cell process steps. An initial wet bench will perform surface roughing and wafer cleaning, followed by a doping step in a diffusion furnace, another wet bench to do a pre-clean, then a plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) tool for passivation and anti-reflective coating (ARC). A metallization step is done in a screen-printing line tool, followed by furnace and etch steps, and finally wafer testing.

Asked about thin-film process development, Marquardt said SVTC plans future announcements following the completion of talks with potential customers. “There is certain special equipment that would serve thin-film development. We don’t have any definitive agreements yet, but our plans are to put it in so we can provide for our customer’s needs.”