SAN JOSE, Calif -- The machine looks like a square spaceshipwith a round hatch or a giant oven with a convection fan. Its designer jokinglycalls the contraption the "world's most expensive bug zapper."
In fact it's a wafer tool, developed by San Jose start-upTwin Creeks Technologies as a better, cheaper way to make solar cells.
Given the collapse in solar panel ASPs (average sellingprices) over the past year or so, reducing solar cell manufacturing costs iscritical to competitiveness. It isn't clear whether Western manufacturers canstill compete with their Chinese rivals, which are believed to have leveragedample government funding to shore up their business as they slashed prices andgrabbed market share.
But Twin Creeks is betting there's still a business inmaking the machines that make solar cells. By adding value in the manufacturingprocess, company executives claim, the third-generation Hyperion wafer toolcould put the United States back in the solar business, or at least one segmentof it.
Siva Sivaram, Twin Creeks' voluble CEO, knows a lot aboutelectronics manufacturing. A 14-year veteran of Intel, where he oversaw thechip giant's external manufacturing, Sivaram literally wrote the book onchemical vapor deposition; his 1995 text is still used in college engineeringcourses. Sivaram eventually joined his idol, Intel co-founder Robert Noyce, atthe Sematech chip manufacturing consortium. While there, Sivaram worked onanother key chip manufacturing technology, chemical-mechanical planarization.
After stints at Matrix Semiconductor (acquired by SanDisk in2006) and on the board of Nanosolar, Sivaram founded Twin Creeks in 2008. Thecompany kept a low profile until last month, when it introduced itsthird-generation Hyperion tool, the production version of its solar cellmanufacturing technology. The machines are being made in Senatobia, Miss, underterms of an economic development deal with the Magnolia State.
The arrangement keeps the manufacturing technology -- and atleast a few jobs -- in the United States, Sivaram said in an interview. "Theknow-how stays in the US," he said.
The problem with current solar manufacturing, Sivaram said,is that "something comes in, something goes out, with no value" added. Thecompany concluded that much thinner wafers could halve the cost of making solarcells. It applied the principles behind a technology called proton-inducedexfoliation to develop the Hyperion tool. The technique slices wafers toproduce efficient, flexible solar cells as thin as 20 microns.
"You remove the waste, you make the material moreproductive, you add more value in your factory instead of just taking [solar]materials and selling it for a few cents more," Sivaram said in pitching hisproduct. "The value here is in the ability to make those thin" wafers.
The Hyperion 3 can process more than 1.5 million thin wafersannually, or about 6 megawatts' worth of solar cells. Given the competitivenature of the solar business, Sivaram said, Twin Creeks is already at work on anext-generation tool capable of producing 8 MW per year. "We need to keepimproving," the CEO said.
Twin Creeks claims to have lined up five "qualifiedcustomers" in China since the production version of the Hyperion tool wasreleased.
No word yet on any US customers.
Watch a video interview with Sivaram here.
This story was originally posted by EETimes.