To improve conversion efficiency, increase yield and reduce the manufacturing costs of solar cells, chip design software supplier Magma Design Automation said it is developing a new yield enhancement software system customised for solar fabs.

EDA tool giant, and Magma rival, Synopsys disclosed during last month’s Semicon West tradeshow that it has had a tool in this space for some time.

To refine product specifications and test the tool, which is based on Magma’s YieldManager software, the company is collaborating with Pegasus Semiconductor-Solar.

Currently, solar-converted electricity costs two to three times as much to produce as energy generated from traditional sources with inefficient energy conversion and the need to produce a very large number of wafers contributing to the high cost, Magma said.

Also, since only about 16% of light that hits a solar cell wafer can be collected as usable electricity, in order to produce enough solar cells to generate 500 megawatts a year, a solar cell fab must produce as many as 400,000 wafers a day, an exponentially larger number than even the largest semiconductor plants produce, the company said.

As such, the cost of the silicon alone, not to mention the manufacturing costs, for that number of wafers is considerable so improving the energy conversion efficiency, reducing the manufacturing costs and increasing the yield of silicon wafer-based solar cells are critical to the growth of the solar market.

Magma said its software is meant to allow solar fabs to better monitor all metrology, inspection and performance data throughout the manufacturing process in order to allow fab operators to identify and correct root causes of solar-efficiency and yield degradation caused by subtle fab processing fluctuations or instability.

“Semiconductor manufacturing tools such as rapid fault detection, advanced process control and integrated yield management -- which enabled rapid technology introductions and fast yield ramps -- are now critically needed in the solar industry to reduce costs. To keep up with the overwhelming demand, innovation in the solar fabrication process must be accelerated, and today no enterprise-wide yield enhancement software exists for solar fabs. Being able to base a much-needed solution on a proven product such as YieldManager is a terrific advantage for Magma,” said Dr. Sudhindra Tatti, president of Pegasus Semiconductor-Solar, a systems integrator in the solar industry that also provides semiconductor manufacturing expertise and consulting to solar manufacturers, in a statement.

Magma said its YieldManager tool is meant to allows fast, accurate analysis and correlation of disparate data from most of the equipment in the manufacturing line so that semiconductor test and production engineers can quickly identify and correct root causes of yield loss thereby saving time, maximizing equipment utilization, increasing yield and reducing costs.

Given that the software has proven to efficiently address yield management for complex semiconductor fabrication, Magma believes a solar-targeting version of YieldManager could effectively address the similar solar cell fabrication process.

The company also said it is collaborating with several solar fabs and will soon announce installation sites in Asia.

Meanwhile, Synopsys’ approach is based on the company’s TCAD technology and focuses currently on silicon-based and compound semiconductor-based solar cell technologies. Synopsys explained that the value of TCAD in solar cell design is that it provides key insights into the physics of cell operation; it allows designers to optimize efficiency of the cell; and allows virtual exploration of new cell designs. The company has been collaborating with a number of key research partners over the past few years in the development of its technology.

Ann Steffora Mutschler is senior editor at Electronic News