Fraunhofer CSP’s IP Protection Project For German & European PV Companies

As solar PV technology domain becomes increasingly competitive, the Fraunhofer Center for Silicon Photovoltaics CSP of Germany has unveiled the IP Protection project which it says will help protect intellectual property for German and European solar PV companies.  

The rapid advancements in solar PV technology means inventions can be copied. Infringements of property rights are difficult to detect. With the IP Protection project, the idea is to develop processes that can detect patent infringements for the technology used and proven legally.  

Under the project, Fraunhofer CSP is working with partners to research preparative and analytical processes to provide ‘legally secure evidence’ of patent infringements.  

High-resolution material and thin-film characterization with a focus on interfaces will be the subject of attention. It mentions large-area preparation and high-resolution characterization of encapsulated layers, localization of microscopic current paths, evaluation of local passivation properties.  

The Project Manager of IP Protection and Acting Team Leader of Solar Cell Diagnostics at Fraunhofer CSP, Dr, Stefan Lange explained that the processes developed will create low-damage, analytical access to buried interfaces in solar cells using etching and polishing processes. Using its profiling measurement methods like the TEM, ToD-SIMS, XPS, it can then investigate the organic and inorganic layers and interfaces, down to the atomic level to detect patent infringement.   

“We can provide the best possible support to companies that want to protect their innovative products through our research, so that a clear and legally sound assessment of material and interface properties together with cause-effect principles will be possible in future solar cell multilayer systems,” said Lange. 

Funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection (BMWK), the IP Project – High-resolution material and thin-film analysis for next-generation solar cell technologies will run till March 2027.  

The Fraunhofer CSP’s effort for IP protection comes in the wake of several companies, both Chinese and non-Chinese, recently getting into patent infringement lawsuits, with a lot of recent cases related to the TOPCon cell technology (see TOPCon Patent Ownership War Heating Up, Now Moving To China).