OMT have brought over 12 years’ experience in the field of optical metrology to PV. Using their expertise and innovative products, OMT has found success in a number of markets, and have plans to expand even further. Dr. Matthias Eberhardt speaks to PES about their involvement in thin film and the wider PV industry.
PES: Welcome to PES. Firstly, can you tell us a little about the history of your company and explain how your products serve the PV industry?
Dr. Matthias Eberhardt: I founded OMT in 1999 to develop and manufacture innovative and customised solutions in the field of automated optical metrology. Our background in instrumentation, optical design, fine mechanics, and software development – all under one roof – enable us to meet our customer requirements and provide state-of-the-art, cost-effective, technical solutions.
In general our products allow our customers to obtain critical information about a surface or a thin film on a substrate. Our non-contact measurement systems are ideal for industrial process control of parameters such as film thickness, sheet resistance, chemical composition, moisture and colour. To determine these parameters, OMT leverages techniques e.g. reflectometry, spectral ellipsometry, photo-/electroluminescence (PL/EL) spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and video microscopy for both inline and desktop laboratory systems. OMT also manufactures substrate scanner / mapping systems in which all of our measurement tools can be integrated. Furthermore we provide full industrial software integration, which supports e.g. SECS-GEM and Profibus protocols, for all of our hardware. To be precise: OMT delivers state-of-the-art and fully automated optical metrology tools. OMT continuously develops innovative optical measurement solutions, which have been incorporated in the glass, paper, semiconductor, environmental monitoring, and food industries. We are expanding our scope to pharmacological and biotechnological applications in 2012 and 2013.
Today, optical metrology tools are instrumental in helping industry with fast and efficient inline production process monitoring, as well as quality and statistical process control. This is especially true for the thin film PV industry covering CIGS, a-Si and µc-Si materials. After WITec GmbH (a world-leading manufacturer of high performance optical and scanning probe microscopy systems) acquired a majority holding in OMT in 2010, OMT and WITec together developed an industrial Raman microscope especially with CIGS in mind. Since 2011, this Raman microscope has been installed in factories in the US, Europe and Asia for quality control and material monitoring of the solar panel’s chemical composition.
