Amorphous Silicon Research: Final Technical Report, 13 September 1994 - 28 February 1998

The Solarex research and development program has focused for the last few years on developing a high-performance amorphous silicon tandem process and on scaling it up to large areas. Significant progress has been made in several areas: (1) improved understanding of the light-induced degradation of amorphous silicon alloys, (2) the processing time for tandem device structures has been reduced by21%, (3) the feedstock gas utilization has been increased by 30%, (4) stabilized conversion efficiencies of more than 8% have been demonstrated in 4-ft2 tandem modules made in a pilot production mode, and (4) the tandem module process has been transferred to a Solarex manufacturing plant in Virginia that is capable of producing 10 MW of 8.6-ft2 tandem modules per year.