Manufacturing
Since its founding, DayStar has been focused on developing a manufacturing process based on sputtering technology that would enable high volume production to achieve the lowest costs for the highest solar cell performance.
Progress during this development phase enabled us to reproducibly achieve greater than 10% cell efficiencies on large area solar cell devices. Technical achievement of this milestone demonstrated a highly scaleable deposition process capable of the performance benchmarks required to effectively reach successful product commercialization. This proprietary process rivals the cell efficiencies of the best-known direct deposit methods, such as co-evaporation, with the unique uniformity and throughput advantages of sputtering, and will form the basis for our first 25MW commercial manufacturing line which is being installed now in Newark, CA.
CIGS Monolithic Manufacturing Process
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The manufacturing process for making CIGS modules begins with a cleaning step for the glass substrate followed by a sputter deposition of the back contact material. The back contact is scribed to form the initial cell structure, and then the CIGS deposition is accomplished with our proprietary direct deposition process. The junction partner is deposited on top of the CIGS layer, and the second scribe is accomplished before the final transparent conductive oxide coating is deposited. The monolithic cell structure is completed with the third scribe, a polymer laminate is laid down and the encapsulating glass sheet is bonded to the substrate glass. Electrical leads and junction boxes are added at the finishing step. The completed module is tested and binned by performance.