Trends in solar cell research

Photovoltaics (PV) is becoming an important industrial product. Today the PV market is dominated by wafer based crystalline Si cells. The cost of these cells will decrease in the future by using thinner wafers and devices with higher conversion efficiency. It is expected that nanotechnology will play an important role in the longer run in order to further lower the PV cost. PV can also profit from cross fertilization with micro- and nano-electronics. PV modules have shown to be very reliable in the field but more reliability research is needed in fields such as ultra-thin Si wafer based cells, concentrator PV and organic solar cells.