Development of an economical silicon solar cell

The growth of electronically viable silicon films on inexpensive foreign substrates is studied, with the objective of creating a technology to radically reduce the overall cost of the silicon employed in photovoltaic solar energy conversion. The approach employed is to enhance crystalline ordering during film nucleation by confining arriving silicon atoms to a narrow band traveling across a substrate, i.e., the Lateral Growth Technique (LGT). The efforts have employed physical vapor deposition of silicon in a vacuum evaporator on glass and metal substrates with both slit masks and single defining edges, and subsequent chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of thicker films on these thin film structures by pyrolysis of silane at higher temperatures.