Project 019 – Development of measurement equipment

Surface Resistance Scanner for Silicon Wafers

This equipment was built to help researchers understand their doping process for silicon wafers to improve the quality and efficiency of silicon solar cells.

A silicon wafer could be placed onto a vacuum plate that was mounted on a XY-table. A set of four probes was mounted on a Z-axis, and could be lowered onto the wafer for an accurate four-point resistance measurement. Computer software was written to control the XY-table and to take the measurements. The size, shape and resolution of the desired measurement area could be defined in the software.

The software had a network connection so the (slow) process could be monitored remotely.