1366 Technologies Direct Wafer Product Achieves New Performance Records in Customer Trials
1366 Technologies recentlyannounced a series of new performance records for its kerfless, drop-in 156mm multi-crystalline wafers, including a champion result of 19.1% on an industrial line. The result was independently verified by the Fraunhofer ISE. Customers using 1366’s proprietary Direct Wafer™ technology and passivated emitter rear contact (PERC) cell process achieved an average of 19% cell efficiency.“The disruptive nature of the Direct Wafer process is not only evident in the cost and material savings it provides, but in its ability to break the technology limitations of conventional wafer manufacturing. The rapid and significant efficiency gains we’ve achieved will be further increased by new wafer features made possible only with our process,” said Frank van Mierlo, CEO, 1366 Technologies. “We intend to change the way the industry thinks about wafers. There are more gains to be had, and we have a clear roadmap to achieve 20% cell efficiency.”
The 1366 team currently has a manufacturing hub of three, fully-operational furnaces at their demonstration facility in Bedford, MA. Each furnace is capable of throughput in excess of 5 MW of wafers per year– on par with standard directional solidification furnaces while using just one half of the space and delivering a 60% reduction in energy consumption per wafer. This hub has demonstrated manufacturing readiness for “copy intelligently” scaling and is the blueprint for the Company’s first commercial scale facility, which will house 50 Direct Wafer furnaces.“These most recent achievements are exciting because they were attained in industrial lines, not a lab. They represent a real leap forward,” continued van Mierlo. “We are well on our way to producing high performance wafers at a cost of less than $0.40 each at GW scale.”
Earlier this month, 1366 announced it will build its 250 MW commercial facility in Genesee County, New York. The facility will initially produce 50 million wafers each year and eventually scale to 3 GW of capacity, manufacturing 600 million wafers each year.1366 Technologies’ Direct Wafer process forms multi-crystalline wafers directly from molten silicon instead of today’s multi-step, energy- and capital-intensive approach. The result is a uniformly better wafer, created at one-half the cost.
