1 February 2011

Finland’s Beneq receives €9m funding

Beneq Oy of Vantaa, Finland has received €9m in funding from government-owned investment firm Finnish Industry Investment Ltd, Nordic venture capital fund Via Venture Partners, and private investors.

Via Venture Partner has been an investor in Beneq since 2007. “Beneq is an extremely promising company with a strong management team that has proven capable of bringing Finnish technology to the global scene,” says partner Peter Thorlund Haahr.

Founded in 2005, Beneq supplies equipment for nano-scale thin-film coatings used in solar cells, glass coatings, and flexible electronics such as organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting, as well as offering complete coating services. Coating applications are based on two platforms: atomic layer deposition (ALD) and aerosol coating (nHALO and nAERO).

In particular, Beneq’s TFS 1200 Thin Film System is an ALD processing module designed to be integrated into copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) evaporation or rapid thermal processing (RTP) selenization lines for in-line production of buffer layers on CIGS thin-film photovoltaic cells.

Using ALD eliminates the only liquid phase deposition step — chemical bath deposition (CBD) — from the process flow, so there is no excessive water handling, no toxic effluents and no need for waste water purification. As well as being more compact, the dry coating process simplifies production routines, allowing integration into the production line alongside other vacuum deposition steps (minimizing exposure of the substrate to atmospheric gases) as well as reducing cost, says the firm.

In addition, ALD allows the introduction of cadmium-free buffer layers, which means less of a load on the environment and less stringent in-house material safety routines, says Beneq. In particular, ALD enables replacement of the conventional cadmium sulfide (CdS) buffer layer with one with a higher bandgap energy and light transmission — specifically by depositing a dense and conformal zinc oxysulfide Zn(O,S) buffer layer — resulting in an increase in conversion efficiency of more than 1 percentage point. Beneq says that, with ALD, it is possible to adjust and optimize the oxygen/sulfur (O/S) ratio of the film type for the CIGS panel. Also, the intrinsic properties of ALD coatings, conformal and dense, enable enhanced blocking of pinholes in the CIGS cells.

The TFS 1200 can accommodate a maximum substrate size of 1200mm x 1200mm (a record for ALD, it is claimed). Deposition time for a 30nm-thick Zn(O,S) buffer layer is less than 5 minutes, giving an in-line throughput of 12 panels per hour and hence 100,000m2 per year (equivalent to 12MWp). In an off-line configuration, throughput can be doubled.

Beneq employs more than 60 people in Vantaa and in sales offices in Germany, China and USA. Over the last three years, the firm's revenue has shown an average annual growth rate of 93%, to about €10m in 2010. The firm is currently moving from pilot to industrial production.

“The company has already proven its growth capabilities and we are expecting strong export-driven growth also in the future,” says Juha Lehtola, investment manager at Finnish Industry Investment.

“This investment in Beneq is, on the one hand, a definite sign of confidence in our corporate strategy, our technical expertise and our projected continued growth,” says CEO Sampo Ahonen. “On the other hand, it is also a guarantee of constant expansion and development of our services for our customer base, be that full-scale industrial production, research or R&D,” he adds.

Tags: ALD CIGS RTP

Visit: www.beneq.com