Technology
Technology

 

XsunX Differentiation – Eliminating the Variables

 

Current techniques for the production of CIGS thin films do not leverage small area, high throughput, production technologies which allow for the precise control of thin film properties. Development and production of CIGS, and many other thin films, have focused on the use of large area substrates or continuous moving roll-to-roll deposition methods. While CIGS holds the record for best thin film cell performance at nearly 20% in smaller area devices, scaling these laboratory results to large area devices have proved costly and difficult, resulting in much lower product efficiencies. Quality is sacrificed for quantity and the net results are products that deliver only fractions of the CIGS potential.

 

So What Has Held CIGS Back From Market Dominance?

 

  • Inability of manufacturers to transfer laboratory results to large area processing

  • All efforts have focused on large area processing or continuous moving substrates

  • All efforts to date have left nearly 100% of the potential performance behind

  • Primary cause are pinholes and defects to the solar cell structure caused by inability to control large area process and contamination

By reducing process variation and defects to the solar cell that have occurred when manufacturing processes have been scaled to large areas XsunX believes that the capability to directly transfer laboratory results and processes, or to improve and optimize processes in smaller areas, will allow commercial scale production to achieve or maintain improvements to the physical properties and efficiencies of the CIGS cell.

 

Using small substrates, the US National Renewable Energy Laboratories routinely achieves high efficiencies for CIGS with 19.9% peaks. Common sense then dictates that if you already have a process in place that is delivering high efficiency results you should then focus development of a method to put the process to work making millions of high performance solar cells per year per system.

 

Our revolutionary method combines the higher cell efficiencies that can be achieved through small area (about 5" squares) processing techniques with the high rate processing techniques developed within the hard disc media industry. We believe that through the successful combination of these techniques, overall factory yields (total watts of production per day) will be increased thereby resulting in lower production costs while still delivering the full energy and low cost potential that CIGS based devices can offer.