Wafer separation tool

Due to the necessety  to reduce for cost reasons manually operated steps in the production of PV wafers it is needed that wafers are separated automatically. Another reason to change the separation from a manually separation to an automated one is that the price for Silicon varies dramatically from time to time.  

So it is needed to win as much as possible wafers from each ingot. This only can be reached by the production of thinner wafers.  

Due to the fact that this wafer separation tool uses the whole surface of the wafer selective forces on certain places of the wafer-surface are avoided. There is no problem to separate manually wafers from a waferstack with a thickness of 150 μm or more  as this is already very common in the wafer production for well skilled operators but when the wafers are becoming thinner the probability will be increased that a higher percentage of  wafers will be broken and cannot be further used for the production of PV-cells.  

Due to the fact that this wafer separation tool uses the whole wafer-surface wafers with a thickness of 90 μm can be separated. This wafer separation tool has been developed by M.E.L.  

M.E.L: asked for a patent for this method and tool for wafer separation and received international patents. M.E.L granted a licence for this patent. A well known German company  involved in the production of equipment for the semiconductor- and PV-industry for many years hold this licence and realized together with M.E.L. the wafer separation tool. 

Wafer separation tool prototype