Taiwan's Sun Well Solar, a subsidiary of CMC Magnetics, has announced that the upgrade of its of the 40 MW amorphous thin film silicon production line has been completed one month ahead of schedule.
The installation includes Swiss based Oerlikon Solar's low pressure chemical vapor deposition and transparent conductive oxide front and back contact technology, and trials over the last six months showed average module power production yields exceeded contractual targets.
The Sun Well Solar manufacturing line is currently producing more than 1,250 panels or 110 kW produced per day. According to Sun Well this output is equivalent to about 10% of the world's thin film silicon PV module production, making Sun Well one of the largest producers in Asia. Oerlikon Solar and Sun Well have already announced plans to expand Sun Well's production capacity in the future.
On this project Oerlikon Solar has implemented a special high performance front and back contact method in its production lines. A low pressure chemical vapor deposition process is used to generate a transparent and conductive transparent conductive oxide layer. This technique is said to be superior to conventional methods since the light transmission and scattering properties of this layer are very important for the efficiency, with which the solar module can convert sun light into electric power.