Swiss industrial manufacturer of photovoltaic production equipment, specializing in high-efficiency solar cell technology and automated module manufacturing.
Meyer Burger AG is a Swiss industrial company that manufactures equipment and develops processes for photovoltaic solar cell and module production. Their core business is enabling high-efficiency, cost-competitive solar manufacturing at industrial scale — they build the machines and processes that solar factories use to produce cells and modules. In H2020, they contributed manufacturing know-how to two solar cell research consortia: one advancing carrier-selective contact cell architectures (DISC) and one automating PV cell and module production lines to restore European competitiveness against Asian manufacturers (AMPERE). Their value in a consortium is the rare combination of device-level cell expertise and full-scale factory integration capability.
DISC (2016–2019) focused on double-side contacted cells with innovative carrier-selective contacts, a key efficiency-enabling technology for next-generation silicon solar cells.
AMPERE (2017–2020) targeted automated photovoltaic cell and module production at industrial scale to regain European solar manufacturing competitiveness.
Both DISC and AMPERE sit at the intersection of energy technology and advanced manufacturing, consistent with an equipment supplier bridging lab research and factory production.
Both H2020 projects started within a year of each other (2016 and 2017), so there is no meaningful long-term keyword shift to analyze from this dataset alone. What the two project titles do reveal is a dual-track strategy: DISC addresses cell-level efficiency through advanced contact architectures, while AMPERE addresses system-level factory automation — suggesting Meyer Burger was simultaneously pushing the technology frontier and the manufacturing readiness frontier. The move from device innovation (DISC) toward full-process industrial automation (AMPERE) is consistent with a company maturing from equipment vendor toward integrated manufacturing solutions provider.
Meyer Burger appears to be moving from supplying individual process steps toward owning full automated production line solutions — a direction confirmed by their post-H2020 pivot to manufacturing their own solar cells and modules in Europe.
Meyer Burger participates exclusively as a consortium partner — never as coordinator — which is typical for large industrial companies that contribute manufacturing infrastructure rather than project management. Their two projects involved a combined 22 unique partners across 9 countries, indicating they are comfortable in large, multi-national research consortia. For a prospective partner, this means they bring credibility and industrial pull-through but will not carry administrative leadership of the project.
Meyer Burger has built connections with 22 distinct partners across 9 countries through just two projects, suggesting they join large, broad consortia rather than tight bilateral collaborations. Their Swiss base means they bring non-EU industrial capacity into EU-funded projects, which can strengthen a consortium's industrial exploitation pathway.
Meyer Burger is one of the few H2020 participants that sits at the exact boundary between research and industrial production in photovoltaics — they are not a university group proving concepts, nor a pure equipment reseller, but a company whose business depends on making advanced solar manufacturing work at scale. This makes them exceptionally valuable for Innovation Actions (IA) where demonstrating industrial viability is a requirement. Any consortium targeting TRL 6–8 in solar cell manufacturing should consider them as the industrial anchor that can validate whether a technology actually survives contact with a production line.
