One of the most important criteria for continuously producing high quality wafers with good throughput is to have full control of the furnace/puller and wafering process steps. PV wafer manufacturers using Prediktor Solar MES have been able to use our unique functionality to optimize and control these as well as the other remaining process steps. The Prediktor Solar MES solution's unique single wafer tracking solution makes process optimization easy.
Optimization example
Prediktor Solar MES' unique single wafer tracking solution makes it possible to find complicated root causes of production quality problems. In one such case, a wafer manufacturer used Prediktor Solar MES to identify the root cause of wafer breakage. By tracking the broken wafers backwards through the production process, it was found that most of the broken wafers came from bricks that were placed in a certain position in the wafer saws. Further analysis found that the wafers created from the bricks placed in this position had a 30% higher breakage rate than wafers created from bricks placed in the other positions. The problem was solved by adjusting the operation set points of the wafer saw.
For a company with a 130 MW production line, such a problem can cost over 40 000 € per week in lost production. Since the problem itself is difficult to detect without the reporting system that is available through Prediktor Solar MES and the cause of the problem is in a different part of the process than where the broken wafers are discovered, it can be reasonably estimated that without Prediktor Solar MES it can take several months of investigation to identify and correct the problem.
Important functionality
Other important functionalities for wafer manufacturing include:
Downtime reporting
Use information gathered in our automatic reports to increase uptime of furnaces/pullers, saws and other equipment.
Real-time and historical SPC
Help your operators keep the production under control and your engineers to find and correct process deviations.
Recipe management
Reduce human error and increase production time by automatically setting correct equipment recipes.
Automatic production, KPI and shift reports
Communication
Integrate with company ERP, Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) or other 3rd party solutions, allowing access to production data from these solutions.