Alan Rae recently had an opportunity to speak with Tom Falcon, a member of the process development for metallization for DEK Solar, regarding DEK’s presence in the solar industry, the evolution of printing for solar manufacturing and how DEK Solar can help companies increase cell efficiency.

Your recent press release says that you can increase cell efficiency by working with DEK. Which DEK products and processes will help you do this?
Our unrivalled alignment accuracy (+/-12.5 µm at 2 cpk) enables efficiency boosting techniques such as ‘print on print’ and ‘selective emitter’ at industry-leading throughput rates of up to 3,600 wafers per hour. Being the only metallization equipment manufacturer to fabricate their own precision mesh screens, we’re actively working on a several improvements in this area. We also make our own electro-formed and laser-cut metal stencils, which gives us a big advantage when it comes to developing high aspect ratio stencil print processes.

DEK has been very successful in establishing a presence in the solar industry. How important is your partnership with a leading oven maker? Do you partner with ink makers?
Our partnership with Heller Industries is something we really value. Heller have been really responsive to our needs and have simply provided the best solution to high throughput drying in a really short footprint. This enables us to provide our customers complete metallization lines that are only two thirds the length of some of our competitors, thereby giving them a higher output per square meter. However, our arrangement with Heller is not exclusive and we can work with other dryer manufacturers as required.

DEK endeavour to work as closely as we can with all the leading metallization paste suppliers, and some of the new guys too. For customer specific projects we will often form a three way partnership between ourselves, our customer, and the paste vendor. This really helps us optimise our customers’ processes and deliver the kind of results they aspire to.

How do you see printing evolving as we see an increasing interest in flexible cells?
We’ve been monitoring the PV markets for a long time amid rumours of big moves away from crystalline silicon. This hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not expecting it anytime soon. However, flexible PV is gaining some traction, and we’re well placed to support this in high volume manufacture with our reel-to-reel system (R2R). Originally developed for the flexible electronics market, it’s a great fit for flexible solar too.

Where are the competitors to printing and how do you plan to keep ahead of them?
Clearly there’s a lot of focus on alternatives to screen printing. These include laser transfer printing, light induced plating/copper plating/inkjet printing. Our experience of these technologies is that they offer a lot of promise in the lab but often suffer with cost or complexity issues on scale-up. It was interesting to see the results of the survey at this year’s Metallisation Workshop in Germany. The solar industry moves pretty fast to adopt new technologies, but still conference delegates foresaw screen printing taking almost 80% of the market in three years time. Screen printing has risen to meet every challenge the PV industry has presented it with so far, and I believe it will continue to do so for many years.

Of course the time may come when one of the emerging technologies gains a small chunk of market share and we’re well positioned to support this. Our modular platform allows us the flexibility to incorporate new technologies as required and we’re well practised at this.

Thank you for your time, Tom.

—Alan Rae

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