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In 2006, around 86% of all wafer-based silicon solar cells were produced using screen printing to form the silver front and aluminium rear contacts and chemical vapour deposition to grow silicon nitride as the antireflection coating onto the front surface. This paper reviews this dominant solar cell technology looking into state-of-the-art equipment and corresponding processes for each process step. The main efficiency losses of this type of solar cell are analyzed to demonstrate the future efficiency potential of this technology. In research and development, more various advanced solar cell concepts have demonstrated higher efficiencies. The question which arises is “why are new solar cell concepts not transferred into industrial production more frequently?”. We look into the requirements a new solar cell technology has to fulfill to have an advantage over the current approach. Finally, we give an overview of high-efficiency concepts which have already been transferred into industrial production.

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Depletion-region modulation (DRM) has recently been identified as a mechanism that influences photoconductance lifetime measurements. The effect is observed in semiconductor samples containing a depletion-region (i.e., p-n junction solar cells). Experimental measurements presented within demonstrate that the DRM effect dominates the conductance measurement at low excess carrier concentrations, resulting in an overestimation of the effective lifetime by several orders of magnitude. The influence of substrate thickness on the DRM effect is experimentally verified. The previously developed analytical equation for DRM is in agreement with our experimental data and can be used to correct DRM affected photoconductance lifetime measurements. Finally, the impact on the sensitivity of a photoconductance measurement is discussed for the DRM corrected case.

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