At Nanosolar, we have taken the highest-performance and most durable photovoltaic thin-film semiconductor, called CIGS (for "Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide"), and innovated on all seven critical areas necessary to reach a breakthrough cost reduction in solar cells, panels, and systems.

As opposed to using slow and expensive high-vacuum based thin-film deposition processes, we developed a proprietary ink (1) to allow us to use much simpler and higher-yield printing (2) for depositing the solar cell's semiconductor.

We use a highly conductive yet low-cost foil as a substrate (3), which allows us to avoid the need to separately deposit an expensive bottom electrode layer (as required for a non-conductive substrate such as glass).

The foil furthermore allows us to

• apply the superior economics of high-yield continuous roll-to-roll processing (4),

• achieve a lower-cost high-performance top electrode (5),

• assemble cells by individually matched electrical characteristics (6), and

• develop high-power high-current panels (7) with lower balance-of-system cost.