San Jose Factory Construction
By Martin Roscheisen, CEO - October 28, 2007The inside of our completed factory is not open to the public, due to all the proprietary things we have in there on every other square inch. However, here’s a photo from a bit earlier, which shows the first part of one of our roll-to-roll processing tools coming together. Many of our production tools are quite long — e.g. 100 feet. This maximizes the yield, throughput, and overall economics of the mile-long rolls of solar cell foil processed by the tool.
In addition to raw speed, a key advantage of roll-to-roll manufacturing is that after the first few feet of a roll is processed, it settles into a steady state which applies to the rest of the entire roll, resulting in very uniform deposition process parameters applied to essentially the entire substrate. This is much better than possible with processing of wafers or glass plates, where the fact that they have to be moved into and out of each process station introduces start-up and move-out process variabilities (and cycle time cost) to the substrate. Edge effects are also greatly minimized in roll processing (whereas processing glass plates or wafers requires much work and capital dealing with uniformity issues at the edges of the substrate).
