It represents a new class of solar cells with clear advantages in performance, engineering design, operation and cost. For decades, conventional cells have featured wafers of semiconducting materials with similar crystalline structure. Their performance and cost effectiveness is constrained by growing the cells. There are currently many research groups active in the field of in and research institutions around the world. This research can be categorized into three areas: making current technology One way of reducing the cost is to develop cheaper methods of obtaining silicon that is sufficiently pure. Silicon is a very common element, but is normally bound in silica, or. Processing silica (SiO2) to produce silicon is a very high energy process - at. As of December 2014, the world record for solar cell efficiency at 46% was achieved by using solar cells, developed from collaboration efforts of,, France together with, Germany. The Experimental non-silicon solar panels can be made of, e.g. or, embedded in or mesoporous metal oxides. In addition, thin films of many of these materials on conventional silicon solar. can use less than 1% of the expensive raw material (silicon or other light absorbers) compared to wafer-based solar cells, leading to a significant price drop per Watt peak capacity. There are many research groups around the world actively. The invention of (for which, and were awarded a ) may lead to the development of that are based on inexpensive plastics. However, generally. Many new solar cells use transparent thin films that are also conductors of electrical charge. The dominant conductive thin films used in research now are transparent conductive oxides (abbreviated "TCO"), and include fluorine-doped tin oxide (SnO2:F, or "FTO"), doped.