JA Solar to Commercialize Silicon Ink Solar Cells
Using silicon ink technology from Innovalight, JA Solar is developing solar cells at its R&D pilot line in Yangzhou, China, with plans to commercialize by next year.
Aaron Hand, Executive Editor -- PV Society, 9/15/2009
JA Solar Holdings Co. Ltd. (Shanghai, China) is working to commercialize a new generation of high-performance solar products using silicon ink technology from Innovalight Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.).
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| Innovalight used its silicon ink to demonstrate an 18% solar cell efficiency. |
The announcement comes just a week after Innovalight announced a breakthrough in efficiency of its technology. The company demonstrated a record 18% conversion efficiency using silicon ink technology and conventional silicon wafers to produce standard-sized solar cells. The results were independently certified by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE, Freiburg, Germany).
JA Solar is developing solar cells based on the silicon ink technology at its R&D pilot line in Yangzhou, China, and plans for initial commercialization in 2010.
"Innovalight's silicon ink in conjunction with JA Solar's leadership in high-volume solar cell manufacturing with demonstrated yield, conversion efficiency, and low production costs, provides a very promising solution to enhance the conversion efficiency of solar cells utilizing our existing solar cell manufacturing lines," said Qingtang Jiang, JA Solar's CTO.
The silicon ink and processing technologies from Innovalight enable crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cell manufacturers to significantly boost output capacity and cell performance, and reduce costs by adding a simplified step to existing manufacturing lines. "Optimized for use with industry-standard deposition tools, Innovalight's solution improves the economics of solar cell manufacturing," said Homer Antoniadis, Innovalight's CTO.
Innovalight is working with other solar cell manufacturing companies in addition to JA Solar, and is ramping production of its silicon ink.
