Development of an approach to wafer production in an industry 4.0 environment

This work addresses the optimization of silicon wafer production by implementing an intelligent production environment. The objective is the complete digital linking of the process chain from crystal growing to solar cell production to form a so-called smart factory, a term familiar from the context of Industry 4.0. Based on an automatically filled database, each individual wafer is assigned to its specific process values along the process chain. This gives the opportunity to use the latest machine learning methods to establish correlations between process parameters and, if possible, to influence the corresponding parameters in the system. We have tested our approach on a first dataset of wafers from our production line and extended it with data from the resulting solar cells. First results show us the most important factors influencing cell efficiency across the process chain.