Solar mini module made with epitaxial crystalline silicon thin-film wafer equivalents

Crystalline silicon thin-film solar cells manufactured at high temperature are capable to be processed using standard wafer processes. However the proof of this claim was still missing for stringing and encapsulation of those cells to a module. It was the intention of the work reported in this paper to show the validity of this claim. We manufactured large-area solar cells in epitaxial layers on highly doped Cz and mc-Si substrates (epitaxial wafer equivalents), using various technologies of different complexity. On 143 cm2 large monocrystalline epitaxial wafer equivalents, we could achieve 15.2% efficiency. Two kinds of cells were interconnected and laminated to mini modules of 368 cm2 and 576 cm2 aperture area, respectively. Standard techniques have been successfully applied to manufacture the modules, yielding efficiencies of 12.2% and 10.2%, respectively.