Technology

Introducing a New Standard in Wafer Manufacturing

Since the 1970s, silicon wafers have been made using a casting and sawing method. Manufacturers must first cast the pure silicon into large blocks of crystalline silicon, called ingots. These ingots are cut into bricks, polished, and then sliced into wafers. It’s during this final step where nearly half of the raw material is wasted, ground into dust or “kerf” during the sawing process. This process imposes high operating and capital costs — the result of a multi-step, energy intensive process that takes up to a week — and yields wide product variability due to bulk quality defects that emerge in the wafer growth process. Our Direct Wafer® technology upends this complex and antiquated process and replaces it with one, elegant machine that makes high-performance, standard silicon wafers directly from molten silicon every 20 seconds.

A Better Class of Multicrystalline Wafers at Half the Cost

Silicon photovoltaics is the dominant solar technology but there are limited opportunities for cell and module manufacturers to realize significant cost reductions without making investments in new equipment and processes. Our wafers provide such an opportunity and break the historic efficiency and cost tradeoffs of photovoltaics.