Defect Engineering in Industrial Multicrystalline Silicon Solar Cells
MIT SEMINAR SERIES IN MANUFACTURING AND PRODUCTIVITY
Place: Room 33-116 Time: 12:00 P.M. Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
Professor Tonio Buonassisi
MIT
Over the past decade, multicrystalline silicon has emerged as the substrate material of choice for commercial solar cells. To accelerate the adoption of this technology, ongoing research targets further reductions in manufacturing costs by increasing yield, throughput, and material performance, while reducing raw material costs and constraints. In this talk, we will provide specific examples of how novel defect imaging techniques have recently contributed towards these goals, in an industrially oriented setting, by:
(1) Enabling an in-depth understanding of wafer bulk and edge stresses, which contribute strongly to mechanical yield; and
(2) Elucidating the effect of growth and processing conditions on the distribution of metallic impurities in low-purity, upgraded metallurgical grade (UMG) silicon.
In conclusion, an outlook of the development of defect imaging tools for multicrystalline silicon solar cells will be presented.
About the Speaker
Dr. Tonio Buonassisi is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. His research is focused on understanding and controlling defects in photovoltaic devices. Prof. Buonassisi completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. He then became a crystal growth scientist at the ribbon-silicon-producing Evergreen Solar, Inc., where he was part of the team that developed the next generation crystal growth furnace (the "Quad" platform), and spearheaded cross-team efforts to improve solar cell efficiency and mechanical yield in crystal growth and cell fabrication. Prof. Buonassisi was also a visiting scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems and at the Max-Planck-Institute for Microstructure Physics. His work has been honored with numerous awards, including the European Materials Research Society Young Scientist Presentation Award, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Graduate Research Fellowship, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Graduate Student Award.
