Final Technical Report
The goal of this project was to cut the per-wafer equipment cost for PECVD by more than 50% by adopting a Gen 8.5 thin-film manufacturing toolset originally developed for the LCD industry, significantly reducing the total capital-cost, cost-of-capital and wafer-to-cell production cost associated with HVM of Triex cells. Since PECVD is a common process step for many advanced Si PV cells, successful implementation of this device will broad-reaching implications across the domestic PV manufacturing industry. As a domestic PV manufacturing company in a challenging market, Silevo must focus our existing private funding and revenues on developing low-risk, short-term evolutionary improvements to our existing products and manufacturing process for scale-up. As such, without DOE funding, progress toward developing the high-impact manufacturing process described here, will not occur. However, this program leveraged more than $100M in past investment to develop this product and pilot-scale process tool, as well as significant funding that is being deployed to build our 200MW manufacturing plant in NY. With DOE funding, our proposed Gen 8.5 PECVD tool will reduce the CapEx cost associated with this expansion by 29%, allowing us to increase the scale of the Phase 2 facility to 550MW at the same level of investment as our current plan of record. Once this project is complete, all future funding needed to deploy this technology will come from private sources (product revenue and private finance), with no need for future government funding.