The photovoltaic community is enthusiastic talking about the industrialization of this new structure that integrates a passivated contact on the rear side of the cell. The result obtained by CEA-Liten in collaboration with SEMCO Smartech at INES, the French National Institute for Solar Energy is a first step for the industrial demonstration of this technology towards the 26% efficiency already reached on small surface.

CEA-Liten and SEMCO Smartech are developing equipment and processes to produce passivated contact PV cells at industrial scale: on large surface, using high throughput screen-printing.

HORTUS® the new platform developed by SEMCO for boron diffusion and LPCVD deposition of Polysilicon on ultra-thin silicon oxide films already demonstrated its ability to produce passivated contacts with passivation levels among the best of the state of the art (i-Voc 745 mV).

M2 industrial solar cell made with passivated contacts on the HORTUS® tool was obtained during summer. It was measured internally in CEA's lab at 22.8% efficiency.

This result should be quickly outperformed by CEA and SEMCO who have already identified the way to improve the performances over 23% within this year and 25% mid-term.