Advanced manufacturing concepts for crystalline silicon solar cells

An overview is given concerning current industrial technologies, near future improvements and medium term developments in the field of industrially implementable crystalline silicon solar cell fabrication. The paper proves that considerable improvements are still possible, both in efficiency and in production cost. The paper also proves that a lot of effort is being put worldwide on thinner substrates and on thin-film crystalline silicon cells deposited on cheap carriers, in order to save in substrate cost and in order to gain more independence from availability problems of silicon feedback.