RENA Technologies and AIKO Solar Energy Cooperate in P-type PERC Technology

RENA Technologies GmbH (Germany) and AIKO Solar Energy Technology Co., Ltd. (China) cooperate in the field of p-type crystalline silicon solar cell technology. RENA supports AIKO’s transfer to passivated emitter and rear cell (PERC) technology on mono- and multicrystalline silicon and the two companies have agreed to cooperate in the field of plated front side electrodes to replace costly printed silver pastes.

AIKO Solar Energy is currently migrating its production to PERC technology and takes advantage of the flexibility of RENA’s production equipment. Both the alkaline texturing equipment “RENA BatchTex” and edge isolation equipment “RENA InOxSide+“ allows tuning of the processes to achieve the desired surface morphology for the manufacturer’s PERC products. AIKO is fabricating both mono- and multicrystalline silicon solar cells with passivated surfaces and recently also launched its bifacial cell product line using monocrystalline silicon. “The RENA products allow us to easily adjust the processes to meet the technical requirement of the corresponding cell structure: we need different surface conditions for our different products. The texturing and edge isolation tools from RENA enable an easy change and adaption in the production“, explains Chairman Chen Gang from AIKO Solar Energy.

As of Q2/2017, AIKO has achieved conversion efficiencies above 21.5% on monocrystalline p-type PERC devices and recently launched its bifacial p-type PERC product with a bifaciality above 70%. “We are very happy that AIKO Solar Energy continues to rely on the quality of our wet processing equipment to ramp their capacity in the field of PERC solar products,” states Dr. Christian Peter, VP Sales of RENA Technologies GmbH. Up to Q2/2017, AIKO Solar Energy has ordered production equipment for a cell fabrication capacity of more than 4 GW with RENA.

AIKO and RENA also started to cooperate in the area of plated front side contacts. Chairman Chen Gang from AIKO states: “The price pressure in the solar industry continues to push us to constantly look at cost-down measures. AIKO Solar is committed to implement the newest and most innovative technologies into production to achieve such cost reduction. The plating technology using the “RENA InCellPlate” will help us to drive down the cost as we can replace the screen-printed front side silver electrodes. This will be a major cost saving.” RENA will deliver an InCellPlate production tool later this year to AIKO’s new fabrication site at the city of YiWu in Zhejiang province. The two companies state that more than 0.01 USD per watt could be saved in the fabrication costs of the cells, being more than 15% relatively.