Advanced and Emerging Technologies

Another important aspect related to both process technology and equipment design is the need for yield management and process control techniques embedded in the tools, which will have to provide accurate and reliable means for avoiding yield losses in manufacturing and contributing to overall improvement. From this point of view, it is expected that standards in equipment and in characterization techniques will be developed or implemented if already available. 

Despite the clear focus on cost reduction, due regard should also be given to product and process safety. For PV to become widely adopted at the Gigawatts (GWp) scale with a large production workforce and components distributed on millions of commercial and domestic roofs, then safe systems must be inherent in future products. Safety must start with the materials, equipment and the process of manufacture, and include the product safety for system installation and, most importantly, any long-term fire and health aspects of unattended PV systems. 

In addition to silicon wafers and thin films, other photovoltaic technologies are gaining interest and importance such as concentrating PV technologies, in combination with very high-efficiency cells. 

Most of the other novel PV technologies suggested so far can be categorized as high-efficiency approaches, which can be divided between approaches that modify and tailor the properties of the active layer to match it better to the solar spectrum versus approaches that modify the incoming solar spectrum and are applied at the periphery of the active device (without fundamentally modifying the active layer properties). 

---