Two different ways of manufacturing multicrystalline silicon rods witha square or circular cross section of 100mm are presented. The first one uses an optical heating, where the light of high power halogen lamps heats the silicon. Here the melt has to be stabilized by a shaping element. The second method uses an inductive RF heating, where the melt is heated by an RF inductor. This a modified floating zone (FZ) process where silicon granulate is fed from above. With both techniques, nearly flat solid-liquid interfaces in the crystallization process and, as a consequence, a quite columnar grain structure of the rods could be reached. In order to compare the characteristics of these new processes to the EMC (electromagnetic casting) process, which is an industrially applied method, the latter is described in detail and an economic comparison of processes using the continuous casting of silicon