Herbert Arnold GmbH & CO. KG - founded in 1950, is today the leading manufacturer of equipment for machining silicon bricks and ingots in mono- and multicrystalline wafer factories. Arnold's product portfolio includes individual machines, automated work cells combining multiple pieces of equipment, and fully automated manufacturing solutions. Arnold's machines are designed to minimize cost of ownership (CoO) by optimizing parameters like silicon waste, consumables, utilities and machine uptime.
With their recently developed sawing concept, which employs a proprietary cutting blade, cropping cost are reduced significantly. Meanwhile the saw has become a serious contender among squaring and cropping saws used in wafer manufacturing and easily outperforms some legacy equipment like ID saws for cropping.
All Arnold machines are built for 24/7 fabrication environments. The design of all Arnold equipment ensures that machining tolerance specifications are maintained through long periods of uninterrupted operation.
Arnold machines can be equipped with a SCADA system called ARPAT (Arnold Remote Production Analysis Tool). This tool allows process engineers to optimize machining parameters, helps maintenance engineers to monitor the health status of a machine, provides production managers with productivity information and can feed all that to the factory MES system.
 | Shown here is a photograph of a multi-crystalline silicon brick. The surfaces are ground and polished, corners are chamfered, top and bottom pieces are cropped off at positions determined by measurements. Arnold machines are designed to perform all these operations on multi- and mono-crystalline material. |
Arnold's machines cover the following operations:
MONO-crystalline ingots
- Surface grinding and polishing (up to 1,000 mm long segments)
- Round grinding / straight chamfering (up to 1,000 mm long segments)
- Cropping with thin OD blade technology (up to 3,000 mm long as-grown ingots)
- Squaring (up to 3,000 mm long ingots or multiple shorter segments)
MULTI-crystalline bricks
- Surface grinding and polishing (up to 500 mm long bricks)
- Chamfering (up to 500 mm long bricks)
- Cropping with thin OD blade technology
Fully automated solutions
- Work Cells
- Turnkey Manufacturing Lines - Brick/Ingot Finishing
- MONO-crystalline ingot finishing
Automated ingot cropping (top, tail, segments, and test slabs), automated positioning, squaring, surface grinding/polishing, lifetime measurement, round grinding (or straight chamfering), gluing, curing, storing.
- MULTI-crystalline brick finishing (see image above)
Surface grinding/polishing, chamfering, IR imaging, lifetime measurement, cropping, gluing, curing, storing.
- Automated work cells combining above listed individual machines with automated material handling.
- Automated gluing cells to prepare bricks or ingot segments for the wire saw.
| Fully automated brick manufacturing line consisting of (i) grinding cell, (ii) cropping cell and (iii) gluing cell. |
Over 25 fully automated Arnold manufacturing lines are running 365 days per year worldwide.
To form a manufacturing line, work cells are connected by a range of automation options to perform a sequence of tasks. On the input side are for instance the as-squared bricks (multi), or as-grown ingots (mono), and on the output side are the silicon segments glued to a glass beam ready to be loaded into the wire saw. The manufacturing lines are suplemented by (i) measurement equipment such as IR imaging, lifetime, p/n conductivity; (ii) marking equipment ("WISE" system) such as a laser scriber for marking silicon bricks or segments with the result to individualize wafers; (iii) automated waste material handling; (iv) washing units; (v) a control system ("ARPAT") interfacing with the factory MES system.
Examples of manufacturing lines:
Literature for Download
Product Lineup
Surface Grinding/Polishing Machine, Model 72/860
[mono / multi] |  |
Chamfering Machine, Model 72/852
[multi] |  |
Combined Surface Grinding & Chamfering Machine, Model 72/865
[mono / multi] |  |
| Round Grinding and Chamfering Machine, Model 72/856
[mono] |  |
| Cropping Saw with Thin OD Blade Technology, Model 72/360
[mono / multi] |  |
| Squaring Saw for Mono-crystalline Ingots, Model 72/476
[mono] |  |
| Fully Automated Gluing Cell
[mono / multi] |  |
Machine Specifications
The following table provides detailed specifications for all available cropping and grinding machine models. To make it easier for you to find the machine you may need, the table is listing machines for mono-crystalline material on the left, and for multi-crystalline material on the right.
Machine Videos
Ingot Round Grinding - Model 72/856. This machine is used in mono-crystalline wafer manufacturing. Mono ingots must have polished round (or square) corners. This machine can do both. This animation shows the round grinding process and explaines how the high surface quality on the round corners is achieved.
Surface Grinding/Polishing Machine - Model 72/860. This machine is used in multi-crystalline wafer manufacturing to grind and polish the four sides of a square silicon brick. The machine is designed such that the brick leaves the machine with a perfectly square cross section and a mirror-like surface finish. After surface grinding and polishing, the four edges need to be chamfered with a chamfering machine, the 72/852 (see next).
Chamfering Machine - Model 72/852. This machine is used in multi-crystalline wafer manufacturing to chamfer the four edges of a square silicon brick. The 45° chamfers get a mirror like surface finish and meet manufacturing specifications precisely. A laser system measures the edges of each machined brick before and after to insure quality.
Where is Arnold Located?
Arnold is located about 1 hour by car northwest from Frankfurt airport, Germany. Please feel free to schedule a visit with us at Arnold's factory.
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Please visit Arnold at http://www.arnold-gruppe.de/en/photovoltaic-silicon.html