Dieter Schmid

Centrotherm's high end CIGS thin film turnkey solution

Centrotherm photovoltaics AG has chosen Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) as material system for turnkey thin-film photovoltaic production lines because of its great potential concerning conversion efficiencies and economical production. Within CIGS thin-film technology, centrotherm overcomes several disadvantages of former technologies with a unique technology for the CIGS absorber layer formation. The new technology is based on sputter technology on one hand side and a rapid thermal process on the other side. Precursor metal layers are sputtered on large area and transformed to semiconducting CIGS in an ultra rapid thermal process step, which is performed under atmospheric pressure conditions. This leads to unreached short process time on the order of 1 minute and hence to a very high productivity, and prerequisites for real mass production on the GW scale.