Dalsa, a global leader in machine vision technology, has broadened its product market to include solar cell inspection.
The solar cell inspection market demands high quality and high volume production. Machine vision is used for three general purposes: product inspection, identification and tracking, and lastly, product assembly. Philip Colet, vice president of sales and marketing at Dalsa commented: 'Dalsa's cameras and hardware are used in the initial part of the quality inspection process to verify patterns and edges, inspect coatings, and to check for micro-cracks. The precision of Dalsa's image capture and processing technology contributes to the immediate and accurate detection of defects in this critical stage of the manufacturing process.'
Solar cell manufacturers are under pressure to drive down costs in order to achieve 'grid parity', the point at which the cost of solar energy is roughly equivalent to the cost of conventional power distributed on electric grids. Analysts forecast that his may occur in 2011 as module prices continue to drop.
Dalsa's cameras are suited to inline inspection and provide high accuracy. The company's TDI (time delay integration) technology is efficient in delivering fast image capture speeds (110kHz), resulting in improved yields and reduced costs. Dalsa's CMOS sensor technology enables 62fps with 4 Megapixel resolution, for high-speed throughput. The Pantera 22M camera allows image capture of a solar cell down to 40um with one shot by utilising its 22 Megapixels, with low dark current, low noise and higher dynamic range.
