The performance and efficiency of solar cells depends strongly on influence of materials. Key topics for solar cell optimisation are presently silicon material properties and materials for cell metallisation. Optimisation of silicon is focussed e.g. on material properties such as impurity content, density of dislocation and grain boundaries in multi‐crystalline silicon which influence parameters like carrier lifetime, and therefore the cell efficiency. Improved characterisation methods of solar cells like electroluminescence and photoluminescence are combined with techniques such as thermography and LBIC to improve production process and materials. As a result cell efficiency will be increased. Optimisation of cell metallisation and module interconnects is strongly related to progress in paste materials for front side metallisation. Improved materials enable the use of higher emitter resistance and the printing of smaller metal lines, while reducing the series resistance of the solar cell. Progress in paste materials leads to increased solar cell efficiency for the standard cell process. The introduction of new metal pastes has to be combined with careful optimisation of the process window in soldering during module built‐up. (© 2011 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

Fully Depleted Silicon-On-Insulator (FDSOI) technology is a strong competitor in particular for RF applications, providing high performance at low manufacturing cost. In this technology, PFET devices utilize an epitaxially grown pFET raised source/drain (pRSD). However, the pRSD structure adds to the parasitic capacitance to the gate which is a detractor of RF performance. We demonstrate a faceted epitaxial RSD process that reduces this parasitic capacitance (CMiller) by up to -25% and further improves the already high RF pFET fmax by +18%. In addition, we show improved defectivity (-80% non-selective growth defect count reduction), and reduced within-wafer CMiller variability (1-s reduced by -42%). All of these make faceted pRSD a powerful technique to significantly improve device performance in FDSOI.