In 2006, around 86% of all wafer-based silicon solar cells were produced using screen printing to form the silver front and aluminium rear contacts and chemical vapour deposition to grow silicon nitride as the antireflection coating onto the front surface. This paper reviews this dominant solar cell technology looking into state-of-the-art equipment and corresponding processes for each process step. The main efficiency losses of this type of solar cell are analyzed to demonstrate the future efficiency potential of this technology. In research and development, more various advanced solar cell concepts have demonstrated higher efficiencies. The question which arises is “why are new solar cell concepts not transferred into industrial production more frequently?”. We look into the requirements a new solar cell technology has to fulfill to have an advantage over the current approach. Finally, we give an overview of high-efficiency concepts which have already been transferred into industrial production.

We present a solid state nanopore device structure comprising two nanopores which are stacked above each other and connected via a pyramidal cavity of 10 fl volume. The process of fabrication of the pore-cavity-pore device (PCP) relies on the formation of one pore in a Si(3)N(4) membrane by electron beam lithography, while the other pore is chemically etched into the Si carrier by a feedback controlled process. The dimensions of the two nanopores as well as the cavity can be adjusted independently, which is confirmed by transmission electron microscopy. The PCP device is characterized with respect to its electrical properties, including noise analysis and impedance spectroscopy. An equivalent circuit model is identified and resistance, capacitance, and dielectric loss factors are obtained. Potential and electric field distributions inside the electrically biased device are simulated by finite element methods. The low noise characteristics of the PCP device (comparable to a single solid state nanopore) make it suitable for the stochastic sensing of single molecules; moreover, the pore-cavity-pore architecture allows for novel kinds of experiments including the trapping of single nano-objects and single molecule time-of-flight measurements.

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