Magma Design Automation, a provider of chip design software, has introduced YieldManager Solar, a yield enhancement software system for solar fabs.
The company said that the new offering provides analysis and correlation of metrology, inspection and performance data used throughout the solar cell manufacturing process. With this information, solar fab test and production engineers can identify and correct causes of solar energy conversion efficiency and yield degradation caused by subtle fab processing fluctuations or instability.
Ankush Oberai, vice president of Fab analysis business unit at Magma, said: Inefficient energy conversion and the need to produce a very large number of wafers contribute to the high cost of solar-converted electricity and slow the growth of the alternative energy market.”
He further said: “With YieldManager Solar, fabs can carefully monitor the entire solar cell manufacturing process over time and create highly customised reports that enable them to improve the energy conversion efficiency, reduce the manufacturing costs and increase the yield of silicon wafer-based solar cells.
YieldManager Solar is claimed to be an analysis tool that can collect and organise current and historic manufacturing data from the process equipment. It reportedly allows fab engineers to filter data by lot, ingot, substrate, wafer and other parameters and help them to generate reports and dashboards.
