Crystalline Si (c-Si) technology is dominating the photovoltaics market. These modules are nonetheless still relatively expensive, in particular because of the costly silicon wafers, which require large thickness mostly to ease handling. Thin-film technologies, on the other hand, use much less active material, exhibit a much lower production cost per unit area, but achieve an efficiency still limited on module level, which increases the total system costs. A meet-in-the-middle is possible and is the object of this paper. The development of c-Si thin-foil modules is presented: first, the fabrication of the active material on a glass module and then the processing of the Si foils into solar cells, directly on module level. The activity of IMEC in this area is put into perspective with regard to worldwide research results. It appears that great opportunities are offered to this cell concept, although some challenges still need to be tackled before cost-effective and reliable industrial production can be launched.

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Abstract-This paper proposes a novel concept for integrating ultrathin solar cells into modules. It is conceived as a method for fabricating solar panels starting from back-contact crystalline silicon solar cells. However, compared to the current state of the art in module manufacturing for back-contact solar cells, this novel concept aims at improvements in performance, reliability, and cost through the use of an alternative encapsulant, namely silicones as opposed to ethylene vinyl acetate, an alternative deposition technology, being wet coating as opposed to dry lamination; and alternative module-level metallization techniques, as opposed to cell-level tabbing-stringing or conductive foil interconnects. The process flow is proposed, and the materials and fabrication technologies are discussed. As the durability of the module, translated into the module's lifetime, is very important in the targeted application, namely solar cell modules, modeling and reliability testing results and considerations are presented to illustrate how the experimental development process may be guided by experience and theoretical derivations. Finally, feasibility is demonstrated in some first proofs of the concept, and an outlook is given pointing out the direction for further research.