Centrum Badań i Rozwoju Technologii dla Przemysłu S.A. (CBRTP)

CBRTP runs several R&D and production facilities:

1. Nanomaterials laboratory, including processing and characterization facility with R&D and semi-industrial equipment for photovoltaic and piezoelectric applications:
   • ISO5 clean room facility

The facility is dedicated to coating and nanostructures deposition. It is possible to create nanolayers with extreme uniformity and precision down to atomic monolayers over large surface areas, or in batches of many dozen of smaller samples. In order to perform process verification and quality control, the laboratory is equipped with quick characterization tools that allow to determine basic and more complex electrical, optical and structural parameters.

• • Deposition systems / layer engineering

The combination of three different deposition systems creates a great versatility

1. • • Batch atomic layer deposition (ALD): Two Beneq P400 reactors with 350x1000 mm vacuum chambers. The turnkey system including five parallel feeding lines has received an in-house upgrade at CBRTP. This enables the deposition of materials with higher chemical complexity with more metal cations, and additional anions in the form of sulfides (XS-). In addition to standard oxide deposition, sulfides and nitrides can be deposited, as well as their mixtures. This kind of functionality makes the ALD equipment unique on an unprecedented scale.
     • Batch plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD): This system is dedicated fulfills similar purposes as the ALD reactors. While not as precise, the use of plasma enables faster deposition at lower temperatures.
     • Physical vapor deposition: This sputtering system designed from scratch at CBRTP features both DC and AC (RF) sputtering. This makes the system one of the most versatile and adaptable compared to the market and can be used to deposit metals, seminconductors and insulators. Installation pending (Q4/2020)
   • Surface modification
     • Conditioning and heating chamber: This chamber operates under controlled atmosphere and can be used for heating in oxygen-free conditions.
     • Ceramic roller furnace: 4 heating zones with IR heaters allow to precisely control the heating curves and profiles of samples. The furnace topology simulates capabilities of analogous industrial tools.
     • IR heating station: Supplementary to the ceramic roller furnace, the heating is concentrated over a large area that allows to heat a batch of substrates instead of processing them one by one in sequence.
     • Tape caster: Used for coating the substrates with thin layers of liquid.
   • Solar cell measurement systems
     • Open-circuit voltage (V_OC) measurement: Open-circuit voltage is the basic parameter that determines the performance of devices used in energy conversion, such as solar cells and batteries.
     • Minority carrier lifetime measurement­­: In a material used for photoconversion, the lifetime of excited carriers determine how much incident light is converted into useful current.
     • Solar simulator with light and dark I-V characteristics: Full current-voltage characteristics can be measured under simulated solar illumination at standard test conditions: temperature 25°C, solar irradiance 1000 Watts per square meter, air mass 1.5.
   • Electrical properties
     • Four point probe: Sheet resistance measurements
     • Contact resistance mapping (Corescan): This instrument can be used to detect problems with processing of different layers in thin film electronics. A discontinuity in contact resistance is often a telltale sign of an underlying issue that needs to be identified and further investigated.
     • Hall effect measurement: Used to determine electronic transport coefficients. Installation pending (Q1/2021)
   • Optical and imaging systems
     • Reflectometer: Thickness and refractive index derived from perpendicular reflected light.
     • Spectroscopic ellipsometer: Thickness and refractive index measurement by observation of intensity and phase change of light reflected at an angle from a surface. This measurement is slower than reflectometry but more precise, especially for metallic samples.
     • Scanning electron microscope: The ThermoFisher Phenom Pharos system is a mobile solution. It can be quickly assembled on-site and placed on a tabletop. It includes powerful imaging with the field emission source allowing to reach magnifications of up to 1 000 000 x allowing to resolve features that are few nanometers wide. The system also includes energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS). This extension allows elemental analysis and chemical characterization of samples.
   • Device modelling with the APSYS environment: Semiconductor device simulation allows to design modern devices with precise parameters that can be later reproduced in actual production.
2. Manufacturing facility with industrial equipment:
   • Visual inspection station
   • Wafer sorting and distribution robots
   • Inline wet processing platform
   • Inline LPCVD
   • Batch PECVD
   • Metallization printing and firing modules
   • Laser ablation/isolation module
   • Aging tester with climate chamber
   • Diffusion module
   • PSG removal module
3. Outdoor testing of PV modules at multiple sites in Poland and across Europe
   • Planned testing of PV farms and their environmental impact ( Q3/2021)
4. The Laboratory of Automation and Industrial Robotics provides a number of popular solutions to common problems in modern robotic production, transmission automation and laboratory systems. The equipment in the laboratory is used to analyze both typical instrumentation and innovative solutions that have not been used so far.

The laboratory equipment consists of, to name a few, automated mechanical transport equipment, control and programming of industrial robots, programmable PLC controllers, hardware in the loop devices, software SCADA tools, FPGA rapid prototyping systems as well as software tools and measurement data acquisition, including databases.

The laboratory is mainly used to conduct unconventional research works for industrial institutions, to make prototype control electronics systems used for developing and testing control algorithms in real time.

• • Industrial collaborative robots, Universal Robots - six-axis manipulators with real force measurement are used to design and test patterns for industrial production lines.
  • CAD, SolidWorks, AutoCAD, IronCAD environments - software for designing machine parts and production lines, creating technical documentation, visualization and FEM simulation of developed models.
  • 3D printing in three technologies FDM, Binder Jetting, SLA - creating real objects from developed or delivered CAD models. Production of complementary elements for the developed industrial devices and machines.
  • Tool and devices for prototyping and assembly of mechanical elements: bench drill, band saw, disc grinders, assembly tool sets. Sets of mechanical measuring tools: digital calipers, micrometers, sets of inside gauges, feeler gauges, standards and gauges.
  • Industrial measuring equipment:
    • Class S electricity quality analyzers - a device for assessing power supply conditions and diagnosing the operation of industrial devices in the power grid
      • Electronic measuring equipment (multimeters, oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, arbitrary generators) - prototyping and diagnostics of industrial automation devices. Measurement devices with an accuracy below 0.05%, operating in the DC to 6 GHz bands.
        • Single-board electronic systems - Xilinx systems equipped with FPGA processors enabling parallel processing of data from acquisition systems and as a support for post-processing, microprocessor systems with ARM Cortex-A RaspberryPi architecture, microcontroller systems for working in the Arduino, STM32 Nucleo real-time regime.
  • Server computing clusters equipped with IntelXeon and AMD Threadripper processors - the hardware is used to conduct engineering calculations, in particular, flow calculations, strength of structural elements, rendering visualization and designing and developing structures based on machine learning (including deep neural networks).
  • Precise LIDAR 3D LEICA RTC 360 laser scanner - allows you to perform precise scans and on their basis create 3D space models of real objects, including linear infrastructure, spaces of industrial halls, offices, building structures.

Industrial UV lasers with high light power (20W) adapted to continuous operation - the Coherent AVIA forests enable the processing of a wide range of materials, including cutting, engraving, ablation, in atypical materials such as silicon, ceramics, polymers.

Surface engineering

Vacuum reactors systems located at CBRTP nanomaterials laboratory allow for precise coating with layers between a few nanometers up to a few micrometers. Processing is performed in ISO5 clean room with adherence to strict norms and procedure, which results in high quality of deposition. Process parameters are highly adjustable to client specification of substrate size, quantity, desired film thickness and properties.

New coating processes can be designed from scratch and verified from a chemical viewpoint.

The functional materials that can be coated at CBRTP include:

·       Interference layers, such as band filters, beam splitters, polarizers, mirrors, etc.

·       Anti-reflective coatings

·       Photonics crystals

·       Optical diffraction elements

·       Efficient and selective transmission or reflective grids

·       Antibacterial and sterile coatings

·       Hydrophilic or hydrophobic coatings

·       Barrier and protective coatings

·       Diffusion membranes

·       Transparent conductive oxides

·       High-k dielectrics

Thermal treatment

Several solutions are available for repeatable thermal treatment, including protective atmosphere (Ar, N₂). Typical applications include thermal conditioning, sintering, oxidation.

Modeling and simulation

Semiconductor devices can be treated in TCAD software APSYS with a commercial license. Electrical, optical, and thermal properties can be determined in its “multiphysics" model. Is can be used for initial verification of properties and operation of light-sentitive and light-emitting devices.

Materials characterization

The properties of materials deposited on solid surface can be measured.

1.       Scanning electron microscopy with high resolution can be performed with a mobile station that can be transported to client location. The elemental composition of samples can also be determined.

2.       Electrical measurements can aid in the determining conduction type, carrier concentration, resistivity, etc.

Optical measurements can help with determining film thickness and refractive index