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Since the 1960s, studies of transparent and highly conducting semiconductor metal oxide films, such as tin-doped indium oxide (ITO) and fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO), have attracted the interest of many researches due to their wide applicability in both industry and research, such as transparent heat reflecting films, gas sensors, protective coatings, and heterojunction solar cells. Excellent reviews of the subject can be found in the literature (Hamberg & Granquist, 1986, Granquist, 1993, Hartnagel et al, 1995, Dawar & Joshi, 2004). Several methods such as chemical vapour deposition, vacuum evaporation, sputtering techniques, magnetron sputtering, ion implantation, ion-beam sputtering, and spraying techniques have been tried out to fabricate coatings for the oxide materials (Dawar & Joshi, 2004). This chapter is intended to be a comprehensive review of the original results in the field of fabrication of ITO and FTO films by spray pyrolysis technique, as well as their applications for the fabrication of efficient silicon (Si) monocrystalline solar cells and modules with a low fabrication cost. Since the end of the 1970s, such solar cells have attracted the attention of the scientific community because of their fabrication simplicity (DuBow et al., 1976, Manifacier & Szepessy, 1977, Feng at al., 1979, Malik et all., 1979, 1980). It has been shown that those metal oxide films deposited on the silicon surface form heterojunctions, which at a first approximation, can be considered as Schottky “transparent” metal-semiconductor (MS) contacts due to the degeneracy of the electron gas occurring in the n-type highly conducting transparent metal oxide films, such as ITO and FTO. Depending on the method used for the deposition of the films and the type of the silicon substrate conductivity, such contact can work as a rectifier and the surface-barrier solar cell can be designed based on it. Thus, films deposited in vacuum on the p-silicon surface form rectifying contacts (DuBow et al., 1976), while electron-beam (Feng at al., 1979), whereas sprayed films deposited on n-type silicon form rectifying contacts (Manifacier & Szepessy, 1977, Malik et all., 1979). This phenomenon occurs because of the difference in electron affinity of the ITO and FTO films fabricated with the methods mentioned above. Further studies have shown that ITO/Si and FTO/Si solar cells operate almost always as majoritycarriers MS or metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) diodes. The formation of a very thin SiOx layer between the metal oxide film and the silicon leads to an increasing efficiency of the solar cells based on MS contacts (Ashok et al., 1980). However, if the potential barrier at the silicon surface is very high, an inversion p-n layer is formed at the silicon surface. In this case the properties of these solar cells will be similar to those of solar cells based on

Efficient Silicon Solar Cells Fabricated with a Low Cost Spray Technique