PV-TEC: Retrospection to the three years of operation of a production oriented research platform

At Fraunhofer ISE the PV-TEC (Photovoltaic Technology Evaluation Center) laboratory has been built up in 2005. Since then the center has been operated constantly and has been expanded by adding advanced technology and increased infrastructure capacity. Various databases have been introduced to track the work done in this large laboratory. In this paper we show data on e.g. roughly 120 thousand wafers have been processed during the last years in about 1300 individual experiments. Further we show the staff size needed for the conduction of this work. When setting up PV-TEC such data would have been helpful but was not available. A robust baseline process is constantly improved and serves as basis for the exploration of new technologies and cell structures. We show how a set of merely industrial processing systems can be combined with new technology components such that advanced solar cell concepts like LFC-PERC, MWT, EWT, and BJ can be developed and processed.