• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.1-5
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• 2011

In recent years, worldwide production of solar wafers increased rapidly. Therefore, the solar wafer technology in the developed countries already has become an industry, and related industries such as solar wafer manufacturing equipment have developed rapidly. In this paper we propose the color classification method of the polycrystalline solar wafer that needed in manufacturing equipment. The solar wafer produced in the manufacturing process does not have a uniform color. Therefore, the solar wafer panels made with insensitive color uniformity will fall off the aesthetics. Gaussian mixture models (GMM) are among the most statistically mature methods for clustering and we use the Gaussian mixture models for the classification of the polycrystalline solar wafers. In addition, we compare the performance of the color feature vector from various color space for color classification. Experimental results show that the feature vector from YCbCr color space has the most efficient performance and the correct classification rate is 97.4%.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.21-25
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• 2010

In response to the industrial needs for automated handling of very thin solar cell wafers, this paper presents the design concept for the individual wafer separation from the stacked wafers by utilizing continuous water jet. The experimental apparatus for automated wafer separation was constructed and it includes the water jet system and the microprocessor controlled wafer stack advancing system. Through a series of tests, the performance of the proposed design is quantified into the success rate of single wafer separation and the rapidity of processing wafer stack. Also, the inclination angle of wafer equipped cartridge and the water jet flowrate are found to be important parameters to be considered for process optimization. The proposed design shows the concept for fast and efficient processing of wafer separation and can be implemented in the automated manufacturing of silicon based solar cell wafers.

• Journal of the Korean institute of surface engineering
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• v.51 no.3
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• pp.185-190
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• 2018

Dopant-free silicon heterojunction solar cells using Transition Metal Oxide(TMO) such as Molybdenum Oxide($MoO_X$) and Vanadium Oxide($V_2O_X$) have been focused on to increase the work function of TMO in order to maximize the work function difference between TMO and n-Si for a high-efficiency solar cell. One another way to increase the work function difference is to control the silicon wafer resistivity. In this paper, dopant-free silicon heterojunction solar cells were fabricated using the wafer with the various resistivity and analyzed to understand the effect of n-Si work function. As a result, it is shown that the high passivation and junction quality when $V_2O_X$ deposited on the wafer with low work function compared to the high work function wafer, inducing the increase of higher collection probability, especially at long wavelength region. the solar cell efficiency of 15.28% was measured in low work function wafer, which is 34% higher value than the high work function solar cells.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.61 no.1
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• pp.94-98
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• 2012

The behavior of ozone micro bubble cleaning system was investigated to evaluate the solution as a new method of solar cell wafer cleaning in comparison with former conventional RCA cleaning. We have developed the ozone dissolution system in the ozonated water for more efficient cleaning conditions. The optimized cleaning conditions for solar cell wafer process were 10 ppm of ozone concentration and 12 minutes in cleaning periods, respectively. We have confirmed the cleaning reliability and cell efficiencies after ozone micro bubble cleaning. Using this new cleaning technology, it was possible to obtain higher efficiency, higher productivity, and fast tact time for applying cleaning in the fields on bare ingot wafer, LED wafers as well as the solar cell wafer.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.1-6
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• 2012

In this paper, inspection system based on optical scanning mechanism is designed and developed for solar cell wafer. It consists of optical scanning mechanism, NIR camera optics, machinery and control system, algorithm of defect detection and software. Optical scanning mechanism is composed of geometrical camera optics and structured hybrid illumination system. It is used to inspection of surface defects. NIR camera optics is used for inspection of defects inside solar cell wafer. It is shown that surface and internal micro defects can be detected in developed inspection system for solar cell wafer.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.67-72
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• 2016

In this study, the texturing and the emitter formation processes were carried out with the wafer adhesion method to increase the productivity and reduce the production cost of the multi-crystalline silicon solar cell. After fabricating $156{\times}156mm$ solar cell according to the wafer adhesion method, the operation characteristics were analyzed and compared with those of the solar cell fabricated by the standard process method. In the case of a solar cell formed by the wafer adhesion method, it showed Jsc of $32.87mA/cm^2$, Voc of 0.612V, FF of 78.04% and efficiency of 15.71% respectively. The efficiency of the solar cell formed by the wafer adhesion method was 0.1% higher than that of the solar cell formed by the standard method. In addition, the productivity of the texturing and the emitter formation processes is expected to be approximately doubled. Therefore, it is expected that the manufacturing cost of the multi-crystalline solar cell can be reduced due to the improved productivity compared with the standard process.

• Journal of the Korean Crystal Growth and Crystal Technology
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.120-125
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• 2002

Si-wafers for solar cells were cast in a size of $50{\times}46{\times}0.5{\textrm}{mm}^3$ by vacuum casting method. The graphite mold coated by BN powder, which was to prevent the reaction of carbon with the molten silicon, was used. Without coating, the wetting and reaction of Si melt to graphite mold was very severe. In the case of BN coating, SiC was formed in the shape of tiny islands at the surface of Si wafer by the reaction between Si-melt and carbon of the graphite mold on the high temperature. The grain size was about 1 mm. The efficiency of Si solar cell was lower than that of Si solar cell fabricated on commercial single and poly crystalline Si wafer. The reason of low efficiency was discussed.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.57-61
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• 2013

This paper presents adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference based defect detection method for various defect types, such as micro-crack, fingerprint and contamination, in heterogeneously textured surface of polycrystalline solar wafers. Polycrystalline solar wafer consists of various crystals so the surface of solar wafer shows heterogeneously textures. Because of this property the visual inspection of defects is very difficult. In the proposed method, we use local binary feature and fuzzy reasoning for defect detection. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves a detection rate of 80%~100%, a missing rate of 0%~20% and an over detection (overkill) rate of 9%~21%.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.29-34
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• 2013

Solar cell has been considered as renewable green energy. Its silicon wafer thickness is thinner due to manufacturing cost and accordingly micro cracks is often generated in the process. Micro cracks result in bad quality of solar cell, and so their accurate and reliable detection is required. In this paper, near-infrared optics system is newly designed based on the analysis of near-infrared transmittance characteristics and its important parameters are optimally selected using the design of experiment for micro crack detection in solar cell wafer. The performance of the proposed method is verified using several experiments.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.30-35
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• 2013

In order to increase cell efficiency in crystalline silicon solar cell, reduction of light reflection is one of the essential problem. Until now silicon wafer was textured by wet etching process which has random patterns along crystal orientation. In this study, high aspect ratio patterns are manufactured by nano imprint process and reflectance could be minimized under 1%. After that, screen printed solar cell was fabricated on the textured wafer and I-V characteristics was measured by solar simulator. Consequently cell efficiency of solar cell fabricated using the wafer textured by nano imprint process increased 1.15% than reference solar cell textured by wet etching. Internal quantum efficiency was increased in the range of IR wave length but decreased in the UV wavelength. In spite of improved result, optimization between nano imprinted pattern and solar cell process should be followed.