Interconnect minimisation for flexible solar cells

Series connections in solar cells are made to decrease the current, and therewith the transport losses in a cell. Solar energy is not converted at these interconnections and they should therefore be as small as possible. Several laser scribes and printing steps can make a series interconnection between the back and front of a cell, while insulating the conductive layers accordingly. The equipment to be designed should make interconnections with minimal size, while several criteria have to be met concerning the relative positions. The focus of this abstract is on how to come to this minimal relative positions while meeting the constraints. In our initial design, we found that the criterion that was most often broken was that the top layer was not correctly cut.The origin of this problem was the relative movement of a scribe with the substrate. Incorporating a simple feedback loop decreased the interconnection width by 16%.