With conventional silicon solar technology, individual wafer cells are sorted into performance bins before the cells are assembled into panels. This ensures that each panel produced contains cells with matched electrical characteristics.

Nanosolar's approach combines the advantages of thin films with the power of electrically matched cells, resulting in better panel efficiency distribution and yield.

Note that with conventional thin-film-on-glass solar technology, cell sorting and matching is not possible because cell transitions are created through scribing after they are already deposited on the glass substrate. But since each cell has somewhat different electrical characteristics, a thin-film-on-glass panel consists of cells that may not be well-matched.

It turns out that the effect of electrical mismatch per cell leads to exponentially greater losses per panel as a result, and panel yield and efficiency distribution suffer: A bad cell results in a bad panel with thin-film-on-glass technology; but with a cell-sorting technology, only that cell will be a loss. The value impact of that difference is staggering: If a panel contains 100 cells, sorted-cell assembly lowers the yield-loss cost of a bad cell to 1/100th compared to monolithic cell integration.