Increasing Throughput of Industrial PERC Production

The development of new ways of increasing the production throughput for passivated emitter and rear cells (PERCs), as the major solar cell technology in the global market, is an area of great interest to the PV community. This paper presents approaches for significantly increasing the throughput of PERC production processes. The main focus is on the tube furnace processes for the emitter formation and oxidation, with the introduction of the High Temperature Stack Oxidation (HiTSOx) approach. Additional approaches that are currently under investigation at Fraunhofer ISE for increasing the throughput for wet-chemical, printing and laser processes will also be briefly outlined.