Mastering complexity: Suniva’s journey to a 2.5 GW photovoltaic cell production line with FabEagle®MES

Suniva is headquartered in Norcross, Georgia, USA and is the oldest and largest monocrystalline solar cell manufacturer in North America. 

Since 2007, Suniva has leveraged domestically developed intellectual property to introduce several generations of cell technology, each more efficient and lower in cost than the preceding one. Suniva’s cell manufacturing operations have consistently been able to produce cells at costs comparable to global producers. 

Since 2010, Kontron AIS is the reliable partner concerning MES systems and customized software solutions to collect and visualize necessary data or to control production.

In 2024, Suniva began construction of a redesigned solar cell manufacturing facility, with a phase-1 capacity of 1 GW. The company has planned additional expansions to extend its capacity up to 2.5 GW. Suniva’s initial challenge was to integrate a state-of-the-art PERC solar cell production line to MES with virtual single wafer tracking and to coordinate machinery suppliers from Europe, Asia and USA. 

Some suppliers already had experience with FabEagle®MES integration, while others went through a coordinated process to establish working interfaces for material and equipment performance tracking. Additionally, a seamless integration with the existing ERP system had to be done within a challenging time frame.

“Even with a tight timeline, they not only delivered on schedule but exceeded our expectations. At Suniva, we often say that Kontron AIS is our favorite vendor – a sentiment that reflects their outstanding service and commitment.” 

Hawazin Abdullah, MES Implementation Manager, Suniva Inc.

The project presented some challenges in setting up the new gigawatt photovoltaic cell production line, particularly in coordinating with both established and new vendors. Managing these different supplier relationships added complexity, especially with vendors spread across North America, Asia, and Europe, operating in different time zones and providing both equipment and software. Thanks to careful planning and effective communication across the entire team, we successfully managed these complexities and ensure a smooth integration. 

The new production line is designed for high throughput by leveraging optimized buffering concepts within the automation and the high-volume processing equipment. The timeline was tight, with a short lead time to the start of production.

To accomplish the goal of a fast ramp-up of the factory detailed planning was essential. The experience of the previously completed MES project together with Suniva’s expertise, helped establish a shared understanding of the key steps required for a successful project. Detailed specifications were created during on-site workshops, to cover the entire process, from wafer commissioning to the packaging of classified solar cells. 

This involved the definition of a tracking concept for single wafer tracking to ensure quality and further optimize processes for mass production. The requirements for equipment performance tracking were also defined as a basis for real-time KPI calculations and trends, such as OEE. Additional workshops were held with each equipment supplier, either via web meetings or on-site, to define requirements and agree on the design of the interfaces to the MES.

The project involved integrating different types of equipment interfaces, depending on performance requirements and the availability of the equipment vendor. This included industry standards like SECS/GEM and OPC UA, but also vendor specific TCP/IP-XML or database interfaces. 

To accomplish reliability and feature completeness, a specific specification of each vendor was created, outlining the requirements for material and equipment performance tracking. In total, this project included 150+ individual pieces of process and metrology equipment across more than 10 process steps. 

Since Kontron has support available in Asia, local software experts were part of the MES team to reduce language barriers and ensure smooth communication with all Asian suppliers.

At Suniva, the latest MES version from Kontron AIS was implemented with a comprehensive web interface allowing operator workstations to control production on the shop floor. MES also supports office workstations for the configuration of workflows and the analysis of the acquired production data. 

Data analysis is handled by a reporting system specific to solar cell production, providing standard statistics like heat map visualization and correlation reports. For the monitoring of the overall production a configurable SPC (Statistical Process Control) can be used. 

The production flow is fully managed by FabEagle®MES, from the commissioning of raw wafers at specialized operator workstations, to the grading and sorting of solar cells. Even label printing for multi-level packing in master cartons was implemented and supported with operator workstations for packaging. This allowed a full ERP integration for wafer consumable and cell output tracking.

The scalability of the MES system prepares Suniva for the future expansion of the factory and an even higher capacity. This is achieved by distributing the high MES workload across various MES services to ensure efficient and reliable operations. The security of the valuable data is achieved by using database concepts like database partitioning and replication. This allows for the handling of high-volume production data, at Terabyte scale, and is a prerequisite for fast reporting and real-time process monitoring. 

The IT infrastructure is managed completely by Suniva’s IT team, ensuring on-going support and data security for the MES application and database servers.

Kontron AIS and Suniva managed to set up another cell production line. The MES solution was delivered on time and on budget. Kontron AIS’s flexibility in adapting Suniva’s requirements while enabling seamless collaboration across all relevant vendors, has been crucial in achieving a robust integration of FabEagle®MES in the IT infrastructure. 

FabEagle®MES controls production and automatically collects all relevant equipment, material and processrelated data for each production process. All material is tracked on a single wafer basis through the production line, allowing data to be correlated across multiple process steps and enabling engineers to analyze process interdependencies and find root causes for quality issues. It therefore allows the monitoring of process stability and provides all the data required to further optimize cell quality. 

With the MES covering the entire process flow, from the commissioning of raw wafers to the grading and sorting of solar cells before packaging, full integration with the ERP system is supported. 

FabEagle®MES implements a software solution covering all customer requirements allowing for transparency, traceability and production control in a high-volume gigawatt cell production line.