Development of wide operational range fiber laser for processing thin film photovoltaic panels

Abstract

Continued reduction of production costs for the manufacture of thin film photovoltaic solar panels is required to support the ongoing broad adoption of this important technology. Laser scribing is an integral manufacturing process for the production of monolithically-integrated thin film solar cells. An advanced generation 1.06 um pulsed fiber master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) has recently been developed with performance attributes designed to meet current and next generation thin film laser scribing requirements for improving thin film solar cell device efficiencies, throughput, and yield. It features broad pulse width flexibility (200ps to 20 ns), excellent beam quality, and stable pulse output over a wide range of pulse repetition frequencies (50 kHz to 1 MHz). These performance attributes are expected to enable advanced laser process developments for amorphous (a)-Si, Cd-Te, CIS (CuInSe), and next-generation thin film PV cell. As a result of the experiment, we have found that 10 to 20-ns pulse width gives the good results of structuring TCO layers while the pulse width of shorter than 1ns seems suitable for Mo-layer ablation. The scanning speed of 2500mm/s and 6000mm/s has been achieved, respectively.Continued reduction of production costs for the manufacture of thin film photovoltaic solar panels is required to support the ongoing broad adoption of this important technology. Laser scribing is an integral manufacturing process for the production of monolithically-integrated thin film solar cells. An advanced generation 1.06 um pulsed fiber master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) has recently been developed with performance attributes designed to meet current and next generation thin film laser scribing requirements for improving thin film solar cell device efficiencies, throughput, and yield. It features broad pulse width flexibility (200ps to 20 ns), excellent beam quality, and stable pulse output over a wide range of pulse repetition frequencies (50 kHz to 1 MHz). These performance attributes are expected to enable advanced laser process developments for amorphous (a)-Si, Cd-Te, CIS (CuInSe), and next-generation thin film PV cell. As a result of the experiment, we have found that 10 to 20-ns pulse ...