Last December the two parties announced that they had reached an efficiency of over 21 percent on a similar cell, which replaced expensive silver materials with copper. At the time, Philip Pieters, business development director PV at imec told pv magazine that work on copper metallization for silicon solar cells has been one of the "key activities" of the companys silicon photovoltaic R&D program, established three years ago.
The main difference in the technology comes in the form of the electroplated copper contact grid, which is placed on top of the transparent conductive oxide layer, instead of the traditional screen-printed silver.
In a statement released today, the two parties said, "This development of large area Cu-plated heterojunction silicon solar cells is an important step towards a fab-compatible process on large area module integrated solar cells."
They could not be immediately reached for further comment.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.