High-throughput Large-Area Spatial ALD by Beneq from Finland

Beneq announced their new fast Spatial ALD reactor in November last year (Beneq introduces the next revolution in industrial ALD). End of July Beneq released more information in the ALD2016 Ireland exhibition

Large-area sheet-to-sheet spatial ALD system (From Beneq Blog)

Beneq is a pioneer in ALD solutions that enable coating of large substrates, and we have also discussed them here in the blog. Beneq’s Mikko Söderlund was showcasing our innovations in this area to the ALD2016 audience.

Our large-area spatial ALD coating equipment has been developed for high-throughput coating applications such as Zn buffer for CIGS solar cells, OLED encapsulation, glass coating, and rear-surface passivation of crystalline solar cells. The new spatial ALD process makes it possible to coat bigger substrates faster and in a more flexible way. The capacity of the new large-area ALD coating equipment really opens doors to new possibilities in industrial-level coating. You can check the latest results of our large-sheet ALD tests from Mikko’s poster.

The large area spatial ALD reactor from Beneq (picture from Beneq)

The above deposition speeds result in massive area throughput figures. For rear-surface passivation (with a thin 5 nm Al2O3 coating) as a case example, processing wafers at substrate speeds exceeding 20 m/min would allow a single piece of equipment to produce over 30 000 wafers per hour. That is fast by any standard. (from Beneq Blog)

Download Mikko's ALD2016 poster to get all the details of the latest spatial ALD pilots with large substrates.

I met with Beneq at the ALD2016 Exhibition to discuss the new spatial ALD reactor (Picture Fotografie Katharina Knaut).