11 Facts About Amorphous silicon

Amorphous silicon is the non-crystalline form of silicon used for solar cells and thin-film transistors in LCDs.

Amorphous silicon is a preferred material for the thin film transistor elements of liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and for x-ray imagers.

Hydrogenated amorphous silicon has a sufficiently low amount of defects to be used within devices such as solar photovoltaic cells, particularly in the protocrystalline growth regime.

Hydrogenated amorphous silicon has been used as a photovoltaic solar cell material for devices which require very little power, such as pocket calculators, because their lower performance compared to conventional crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cells is more than offset by their simplified and lower cost of deposition onto a substrate.

Source of the low efficiency of amorphous silicon photovoltaics is due largely to the low hole mobility of the material.

However, the world's largest manufacturer of amorphous silicon photovoltaics had to file for bankruptcy in 2012, as it could not compete with the rapidly declining prices of conventional solar panels.

Protocrystalline Amorphous silicon is often used to optimize the open circuit voltage of a-Si photovoltaics.

Amorphous silicon has become the material of choice for the active layer in thin-film transistors, which are most widely used in large-area electronics applications, mainly for liquid-crystal displays (LCDs).

Transistors take up only a small fraction of the area of each pixel and the rest of the Amorphous silicon film is etched away to allow light to easily pass through it.

Polycrystalline Amorphous silicon is sometimes used in displays requiring higher TFT performance.

Amorphous silicon-based TFTs are by far the most common, due to their lower production cost, whereas polycrystalline silicon TFTs are more costly and much more difficult to produce.