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The idea of solar photovoltaic manufacturers leveraging semiconductor fabrication experience and practices is by no means new, and the notion has become part cliché, part mantra. But for every bit of chipmaking expertise that can be employed to improving the supply chain or fabbing cells and modules, there's some counterpoint of photovoltaic specificity.

The one defining difference is solar's relentless focus on cost. Although the chip-manufacturing community also must keep an unwavering focus on the expense side of the ledger, technology remains a crucial differentiator. That's not to say that PV manufacturers don't have proprietary technologies that give them an edge in the marketplace. But if a solar company can't get its production and distribution costs under control (or be on a path to do so), to offer products that help in the relentless pursuit of grid parity, then it should consider getting out of the game.

Wright Williams & Kelly has been helping chipmakers and other high-tech manufacturers get a handle on things like cost of ownership, overall equipment effectiveness, life cycle costs, and factory capacity analysis for years. Lately, the software and consulting firm has seen its solar PV business grow significantly, gaining clients from the process equipment, turnkey production line, and solar cell and module subsectors, including Despatch and Spire.

WWK has actually been working with PV customers for a decade, going back to when it first hooked up with Solarex (now part of BP Solar) in 1998, according to David Jimenez, president of the Pleasanton, CA-based company.

David tells me WWK's PV client base has ballooned into "the double digits, which is small in comparison to our installed base in semiconductors." Smallish yes, but lucrative, since solar is the firm's "highest growth area over the past couple of years," according to the honcho, with "current fiscal-year revenues estimated to be approximately 50% solar related."

Since the company has made several solar-related announcements over the past several months, I thought it was time to find out more about WWK's efforts in the PV sector. What follows are the Q's and A's of an email interview I conducted with David earlier this week.

In addition to the software deals, have you been doing much consulting work with PV clients?

Most of the business we have been seeing in PV has been software license-related. Unlike the semiconductor industry where the real IP is in the design and less so the manufacturing process, the PV world still has a lot of unique approaches that want to be kept close to the vest. That type of environment lends itself to the client wanting to be self-sufficient. In the case of turnkey suppliers, they also need to be self-sufficient since they are running through a large number of scenarios for their prospective clients on a regular basis.

One of the areas where we have seen the need for consulting is in the area discrete-event simulation. Questions we can assist with in that area include sizing buffers between integrated process steps and at what point in a complete process should you build inventory to maintain flexibility for final product configuration.

You mention clients in the turnkey, equipment, and cell parts of the business. Does the list include both cSi and TFPV clients?

Yes, in fact you could cover a good part of that entire business line with just our work with Spire Corp. Of course, our client base is larger than that and does cover all the common manufacturing approaches.

Can you offer some more details on the "revolutionary" client mentioned in the latest press release?

Unfortunately, they are still keeping a very low profile and have asked that we not provide any additional details. What you can read between the lines though is that everyone in the PV space knows that a watt is a watt and they need to focus on cost as a differentiator and not the product design. As manufacturers come to these conclusions, you are seeing them mandate to suppliers that they focus their attention on improvements in cost of ownership. This is exactly the same path that the semiconductor industry followed in the early to mid-1990s and what helped WWK cement our position in the operational modeling market.

How has WWK's experience in the semiconductor manufacturing sector helped in your approach to solar manufacturing, and where is it of little or no value, given the differences between the two?

The biggest leverage has been that the semiconductor industry did all of this almost 20 years ago.  WWK has grown up with the semiconductor industry’s modeling efforts from cost of ownership to factory-level product costing to simulation-based cycle time reduction efforts. Given that the processes are more complex in semiconductors, PV has inherited software and consulting methodologies that are already in place and can meet their needs right out of the box.

The area that seems to have less value is the discrete-event simulation side. Semiconductor processes are anything but linear. You have reentrant flows with rework and yield loss; all of which lead to variation in WIP and cycle time. In PV you are dealing with new lines that are linear and border on continuous flow.  So some of the issues that are critical in 300-mm Prime, for example, reduce down to where to place buffers should a segment of the line go down. As you say, cost is everything in PV which is why we believe that our cost optimization solutions are exactly what the PV market is asking for and needs.

What are some specific examples of benefits derived by different types of PV customers, in terms of their understanding of CoO, overall equipment effectiveness, life cycle costs, LCC, reliability, yields, and the like?

Our customer base can be divided into individual equipment suppliers, turnkey factory suppliers, material suppliers, and factory owners. The traditional equipment and material suppliers only have influence over their step(s) in the process. For that reason, cost of ownership and overall equipment efficiency are their primary focus.  By doing so, they can better understand how they impact their clients and what internal developments will best meet their clients’ short and long term needs. This has been the approach in the semiconductor industry since late 1990.

With regard to turnkey factory suppliers, the primary areas of interest are in providing their clients with the financial section of their business plans to help them more easily get funding.  Since most turnkey suppliers really don't provide all the equipment solutions, they can also model the cost and productivity impacts of various subcontracted options. In the future, as those turnkey suppliers adapt their business models to selling guaranteed output, they can use these same modeling techniques to determine their own cost base, the profit margins, and if the market will support a profit for their clients.

Finally, for factory owners, they are applying the same thought processes as do semiconductor fab owners. They are asking their equipment suppliers to provide cost of ownership data as part of the procurement process and are using factory-level models to understand the cost drivers across the factory. Since cost is their major concern, having access to a full Pareto of cost drivers is critical to their long-term continuous cost improvement programs.

In the case of some start-up PV manufacturers, what are the challenges of getting a full factory analysis when the production toolset might be unique or in an early stage of development?

This is an interesting area. In some cases, parts of the toolset are custom. That makes data hard to come by for some of the initial modeling. That is where sensitivity analysis has great value. We can show our clients the potential range of results and they can then make decisions based on their comfort level with the risk.

The other thing we are seeing is a lot of one-of-a-kind tools in early phases. This is something the semiconductor industry has worked to avoid. It is also one of the areas where our discrete-event simulation software can help understand what happens when these types of tools go down for extended periods and how best to help the entire factory recover.

What do your clients tell you about the state of the PV supply chain, in terms of the consumables, spares, subsystems, etc. base?

Clearly, the PV supply chain is not as robust as it is in semiconductors. There are still a lot of small and regional suppliers and unique applications using custom and one-of-a-kind tools. This can lead to issues with regards to spares availability. The big issues that always come up are prices and availability on silicon, equipment delivery times, and factory start-up issues (yield, efficiency, etc.) on thin films.

Do you have any specific examples/case studies of cost savings garnered by some of your PV clients?

Unfortunately, given the fact that cost per watt will decide winners from losers, no one wants to publish how they are improving their manufacturing costs.

Any unique needs or requirements in the PV arena that came as a surprise to WWK, and how did you deal with them?

There is a lot more interest in financing costs, cost of capital, debt service, etc.  We rarely see these types of questions in the semiconductor industry. Fortunately, most of what our PV clients needed was already in place, and we have been able to satisfy their needs with some relatively minor additions to our software packages.

Do you plan on offering any packages or have any products in development that will be uniquely tailored to the PV sector?

WWK's approach since day one was to provide a technology-neutral set of software tools and methodologies. By being involved in a broad base of industries, we have been able to incorporate the best ideas from a lot of very bright people.  The ability to handle product transformations (one to many and/or many to one) was driven by the AMLCD industry.  Enhancements to our factory-level product costing capability were driven by our involvement in consumer-based MEMS devices. Full-scale labor simulation was driven by one of our very large aerospace clients.

I believe that we will find unique issues in PV but the best solution will be to integrate those into our existing suite of software and consulting solutions so that every industry can take advantage of those good ideas.