- Several equipment vendors offer turnkey solutions for HJT solar cell production, providing end-to-end production capabilities
- Collaboration and partnerships between turnkey solution providers and other equipment vendors or OEMs are common to deliver complete production lines.
In addition to selling HJT cell production equipment for individual process stations, a few equipment vendors are also offering turnkey solutions. These companies, typically having the in-house knowhow for key equipment used in HJT (PECVD and PVD), have extended their product portfolio or cooperate with other tool suppliers. Take Maxwell, which was originally a screen printer maker, and is now cooperating with YAC from Japan for wet-chemical benches and offering an end-to-end production solution for HJT under one roof. The company’s solution also includes automation, MES systems and even MBB-based stringing tools for module manufacturing.
Highlighting the automation solution of the company, Maxwell’s Director Overseas Peter Wolf said that the specialty of its solution are the handling tools provided with additional FFU chemical filters. This facilitates much better clean room standards of Class 1,000 inside the automation as well. The feature turns out to be very beneficial when the wafers are transferred from texturing to PECVD and unloaded from there to CVD. Any level of contamination during these 2 handling steps has a significant impact on the final efficiency and line yield. The automation is capable of handling half wafer formats of M10 and G12 sizes.
H2GEMINI is also offering a turnkey line. While it offers the PECVD along with its specially designed tray-less transport automation, the company has teamed up with exateq for wet-chemistry, and with Applied Materials for the backend line. As for PVD, the company is partnering with an OEM. GS-Solar is yet another equipment maker that is offering turnkey solutions. The below table summarizes the key equipment vendors for all steps of HJT processing and the turnkey solution providers.
Expanding supplier base: HJT equipment supply now has a breadth of players offering separate tool sets and turnkey solutions.
For more details on HJT, download the TaiyangNews report on Heterojunction Solar Technology 2023 for free here.
