Friday, March 6th, 2009
Veeco announced yesterday that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Daiyang Metal of Korea, a leader in the production of cold rolled stainless steel, to be its supplier of equipment to manufacture CIGS solar cells. As a first milestone in this relationship, Daiyang has placed an initial multi-million dollar purchase order with Veeco for its complement of FastFlex Web Coating Systems to build a thin-film CIGS solar cell production line in Yesan, Korea. Veeco currently expects to ship these systems during the fourth quarter of 2009, after which it expects to firm up a follow-on order with Daiyang.
Rotary cathodes inside FastFlex (R2R) deposition system (source: Veeco)
This complement of tools is comprised of one Mo (Molybdenum) deposition system, one TCO (Transparent Conductive Oxide) deposition system and two CIGS deposition systems. Veeco’s FastFlex platform features flexible architecture with high uptime that can be configured to specific needs, with a choice of planar or rotary magnetrons (see figure) for high throughput, high temperature effusion sources, and substrate sizes up to one meter wide.
Chan Ku Kang, CEO of Daiyang, commented, “Daiyang Metal has an aggressive multi-year, multi-site plan to become a leading worldwide manufacturer of CIGS solar cells. Our short term goal is to aggressively ramp to 200MW capacity during 2010 and 2011, which will entail the purchase of additional Veeco systems. Ultimately it is our goal to achieve one gigawatt of CIGS production capacity by 2013. We spent a lot of time researching and surveying the suppliers of CIGS manufacturing tools, and were very impressed with the level of process support and collaboration we received from Veeco during that period. We chose Veeco because they are best prepared to meet our manufacturing and technology needs today and in the future.”
Market research firm Nanomarkets estimates CIGS production capacity will reach 1.4 GW in 2012 and 4.9 GW in 2015 (a 30x increase over 2008’s 152 MW). Companies such as NanoSolar, HelioVolt, and Solyndra each pursue unique CIGS deposition technologies to control the proper film properties. Piero Sferlazzo, senior vice president of Veeco’s Solar Equipment business, commented, “Thermal source technology is quickly becoming the preferred CIGS deposition method because it provides customers with high volume, low cost manufacturing solutions that drive down the manufacturing cost per watt.” Previous thermal evaporation tools reportedly lacked the control needed to ensure proper CIGS stoichiometry for high PV cell efficiency. –E.K.