Natcore Technology Inc. announced that its scientists have created the black silicon solar cell using processes amenable to low-cost mass production. After recently treating a wafer to make it the "blackest" silicon solar cell surface ever recorded, company's technicians used their scalable liquid phase deposition (LPD) process to create the black silicon solar cell, from wafer to finished cell, in their R&D Center in Rochester, N.Y. The next stop for company's new solar cell is NREL, with which Natcore has a Cooperative Research & Development Agreement (CRADA). NREL recently produced solar cells with an efficiency of 18.2% using processes that are less suited to mass production.

Under the terms of the CRADA, NREL and Natcore will work together using Natcore's low-cost passivation technology to achieve or exceed that efficiency with Natcore's black silicon solar cells. This goal would be accomplished by combining Natcore's patented LPD technology with NREL's technologies for creating a black silicon antireflective layer integrated into high-efficiency solar cells. The feasibility of the combined technologies working together has already been demonstrated in a preliminary Natcore/NREL effort that produced a small-area, lab-scale black silicon solar cell with 16.5% efficiency.