Sharp Corp said it has made a total capital investment of approximately ¥72 billion to build a thin-film solar cell plant in Sakai, Osaka prefecture which is capable of boosting annual production up to a scale of 1 GW per year.
With the introduction of the manufacturing facility in the Sakai plant which utilizes large-size glass substrates, jointly developed with Tokyo Electron Ltd, Sharp will improve production efficiency and be able to respond more efficiently to booming demand. The Sakai plant will also serve as a model for thin-film solar cell plants to be developed around the world.
Through horizontal deployment of TFT LCD thin-film technology, an LCD panel plant and a thin-film solar cell plant will be established next to each other, allowing infrastructure facilities and materials manufacturing plants, etc, to all be concentrated within the same manufacturing complex.
Production efficiency will be improved through the enlargement of the glass substrate size to 1,000 x 1,400mm, which is approximately 2.7 times larger than the area of previous substrates (560 x 925mm).
Production will begin by March 2010 with a 480 MW initial production capacity for solar cells. Combined with the 160 MW capacity of the Katsuragi lant (Nara prefecture), this will expand Sharp's global total production capacity for thin-film solar cells to 1 GW in April 2010.
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