Virtual Production Line for Solar Cell Processing

The importance of semiconductor industries necessitates a corresponding focus on developing students to advance the industry. It is recognized that there is a difficulty in transitioning new approaches from the laboratory to fabrication (lab-to-fab). A production environment has extensive inter-relation between different processes. Moreover, the success of a production environment relies on concepts of yield and optimization of a process for large-scale production, which are not typically introduced or used in most university research environments. Further, the lack of access to large-scale data means that the use of statistical design tools is done using either "made-up" data or examples from other industries. Important, students cannot design an experiment in the courses, testing their statistical design or understanding by changing parameters and examining the outputs. A virtual production line for solar cells, initially developed by UNSW and with Jeff Cotter, enables complex processing to be taught via simulatoins.