Advanced Analysis of Multi Wire Wafering Processes

The improvement of each single process step is the major focus of all photovoltaic companies in order to decrease costs and provide high quality products. Within the entire solar cell module costs the wafer manufacturing is still about 16 percent. In this work a new wafering process analysis based on big data sets from machine and wafer characterization is presented. A correlation between given process recipe and the resulting wafer geometry are shown. Therefore new parameters are defined which are indicating directly process variations. The wafering experiments show that the variation of the ratio between feed speed and wire speed causes a change of wire usage that is correlated to a change of wafer thickness distribution. In addition, wire types are varied to observe the impact on the wafer quality and wire performance. Thus, the analysis of wafer thickness distribution was improved to create a multi wire process benchmark to address process issues and wire performance.