beebread
4 years ago
The Company's technological efforts as described above also benefit us in preparation for DM product usage for the next generation of solar cells, particularly "HJT" and "TOPCon" cells. These are the leading contenders for the next generation of solar cell designs for volume manufacturing and deployment. HJT stands for "Heterojunction Technology" and TOPCon stands for "Tunnel Oxide Passivated Contacts". Each of these technologies promise a relative efficiency improvement of four percent or more over the established PERC technology. Pilot or full-scale production of HJT and TOPCon solar cells is already underway at leading solar cell manufacturers.
The proprietary Infrared Reflectometry sensing technology used in Aurora's DM products has unique advantages for measurement of quality-related properties during HJT and TOPCon cell manufacturing. In both cell technologies, conductive layers must be measured independently of similar adjacent material, which is not possible with other measurement techniques used in production. Additionally, the DM is uniquely able to simultaneously measure both conductivity and thickness of certain HJT elements, which otherwise would require two separate measurements.
The Company has DM systems installed, accepted and operating at one HJT manufacturing facility that is operated by the top solar cell manufacturer in China, and we are conducting pre-purchase TOPCon evaluations with another existing large customer outside China.