Silicon material technology and evaluation center (SIMTEC) at Fraunhofer ISE - achievements and visions

The Silicon Material Technology and Evaluation Center SIMTEC has been established at Fraunhofer ISE as a platform for research and development of front end Silicon material processes. It comprises the fields of block crystallization and crucible coating, block shaping and wafering as well as high-throughput silicon epitaxy. Multicrystalline silicon blocks of industrial size with 260 kg and medium size with 85 kg silicon have been produced and characterized. The best efficiency of cells produced on wafers diced of these blocks was 14.6 % for standard industrial cell processing and 13.9 % for the crystalline thin-film EpiCell approach. The kerf-loss at wafering could be reduced to 120 µm by using wires down to 100 µm thickness and wafers as thin as 70 µm have successfully been cut.