With more than 60 years‘ experience providing leading technology thermal solutions to the world, RESOLUTIONS, EBNER'S PV applications division, has entered into a strategic collaboration with Sunplugged, a start-up CIGS company based in Tirol, Austria.

As part of this collaboration, EBNER has installed one of their innovative atmospheric R2R Se furnaces at Sunplugged. This provides Sunplugged with the means to selenize and crystallize metal precursor layers in a single step. The furnace features a unique elemental Se vapor delivery system, which allows uniform selenium delivery and extremely high recovery rates of the Se not consumed in selenizing the precursor layer.

Thanks to this collaborative agreement, EBNER can demonstrate the advantages of this system by offering other CIGS manufacturers the opportunity to selenize their own flexible metal CIG materials, either in roll form or as smaller sized "coupons". Future customers can test the effectiveness of the selenization process on their precursor and will realize the potential savings of a non-vacuum process, high up-time and very efficient Se utilization.

RESOLUTIONS has installed several other production-sized atmospheric R2R thermal tools at well-known CIGS developers, which have been in operation for more than a year.

A pilot tool for CIGS on glass, utilizing the same selenium recovery technology, is currently in development.