Heraeus Photovoltaics, a leading technology solution provider for the renewable energy industry, and Cell Engineering, an engineering company based in Germany, today announced a joint development partnership on LECO technology.
LECO (laser-enhanced contact optimization) is a patent-pending solution for solar cell manufacturers to significantly improve high-efficiency cell bin yields. Heraeus has invented, and is now refining, new LECO-specific metallization pastes which additionally improve overall cell efficiency by up to 0.15%. The technology is versatile and designed to be applicable for nearly all cell technologies which use co-firing.
The breakthrough LECO tool and metallization package is a simple add-in technology that leverages the industry expertise of Heraeus and Cell Engineering. This technology solution significantly reduces metal-induced recombination while maintaining low contact resistance, thereby increasing cell efficiency with minimal impact to the production line and with no process change required. As part of the joint development partnership, Heraeus acquired a LECO tool and invented the new metallization paste to take advantage of the new technology.
Martin Ackermann, president of Heraeus Photovoltaics, said: “Our collaboration and partnership with Cell Engineering has produced what we believe is a potential game-changer for solar cell metallization. It will enable ‘perfect’ metallization contacts and help customers get even greater performance from their solar cells.”
Hans Jochen von Bomhard, managing director of Cell Engineering, said: “Cell Engineering offers the customer the optimal equipment for the use of LECO pastes. The production spectrum includes a laboratory machine as well as equipment for integration into cell lines.”
Heraeus will present its work on LECO-specific paste development this week at the EU PVSEC 2019 conference being held in Marseille, France. The presentation, scheduled for Thursday, will feature the results of LECO-specific metallization pastes on several different cell types including p-type ultra-low doped homogeneous PERC, selective emitter (SE) PERC, n-type PERT and TOPCon.
