What does a solar cell consist of?
More than 90% of all currently used solar cells consists of a silicon wafer which is doped as a semiconductor. To manufacture the wafer a block of the purest silicon is normally sawn into thin slices. During this process roughly the half of this block ends up as shavings which can no longer be used for solar cells since they are too contaminated. To avoid these sawing losses the so-called EFG process (EFG: Edge-Defined Film-Fed Growth) was developed for which SCHOTT Solar owns the patents.
