Leading Edge Equipment Technologies

About Leading Edge Equipment Technologies

At Leading Edge Equipment Technologies, we have built a drop-in wafer manufacturing technology – compatible with existing cell manufacturing lines – that reduces the most cost, capital, and carbon-intensive step of solar panel manufacturing by up to 40 percent: the production of a silicon wafer. Today, the solar industry uses a seven-step process to make wafers, wire-sawing and processing large silicon bricks grown from large, energy-intensive furnaces. This process wastes over half of the silicon ingot, consumes diamond-coated wire, and constitutes over 80 percent of the panel’s final carbon footprint. Leading Edge has developed a two-steps process that directly makes single-crystal silicon wafers without the excessive waste, and using only one-third of the energy per furnace. Even more critically, Leading Edge wafers have the superior quality to enable a “drop-in” up to five percent power increase with commodity solar panel technology. By enabling low cost and higher efficiency, Leading Edge’s breakthrough Floating Silicon Method™ technology gives customers a true double-win.