The high-tech engineering firm Manz AG has further improved its SpeedPicker. The automation system meets the specific demands of crystalline solar cell manufacturing. Its first generation has already been sold over 300 times, the new generation was presented at the EU PVSEC in Hamburg in September. The SpeedPicker 1.1 convinces with a throughput rate of 5,000 wafers per hour and one of the world’s best breakage rates compared to competitors’ products: “With only 0.05 percent breakage per machine, our system operates more accurately than any other,” says Antonio Schmidt, Head of Sales, cSi Solar at Manz.
Between the company’s founding in 1987 and the introduction of the SpeedPicker 1.0 in 2010, Manz had already sold more than 1,000 automation systems with delta robot kinematics. Such systems are needed for loading and unloading process machines within a production line. However, the technology had reached its limits in terms of size, speed, and costs and, as a result, has now been superseded by the reengineered SpeedPicker. The new system is not only highly accurate, but also close to half the size of other systems on the market – it requires a maximum of only seven square meters of space, depending on its configuration. And on the customer side, Manz was able to cut the acquisition and after-sales costs by half. Dieter Manz, founder and CEO of the company, said: “In addition, we succeeded in making the new generation of the system more intuitive, and therefore easier to operate. The system’s attractive price is also an important argument for all manufacturers who are now forced to make their production lines more economical as a result of the ongoing decline in prices seen in the market. And efficient automation is usually the first step toward doing so.”
The SpeedPicker 1.1 works with one or two carbon arms which rotate at the highest possible speed and which are mounted and pivot on a linear axis, therefore guaranteeing absolute precision. A newly developed Bernoulli gripper and a special image processing system ensure that the wafers are perfectly aligned and together offer 100 percent breakage control when loading and unloading process machines. The system can be configured in a wide variety of ways such as with five or eight lanes, one or two arms, or as a box or cassette system – which is important when it comes to integrating it into existing production lines.
