High-temperature CVD for crystalline-silicon thin-film solar cells

The fundamentals of thermal CVD for the deposition of silicon at high temperatures are briefly discussed and applied to the conditions in the CVD system that we have constructed and characterized. Our system fulfills basic requirements to be met for solar cell application; solar cells made from epitaxial layers on various substrates were fabricated. The high-quality cells achieved 17.6% efficiency proving the excellent performance of our system, the cells on economically relevant substrates achieved 8% efficiency which still needs improvement.