Recent advances in the development of solar cell manufacturing systems for large-area Silicon-Film/spl trade/ polycrystalline silicon sheet material have focused on cassette-less wet chemical surface etching, production-level silicon nitride anti-reflection coatings, co-fired metal contacts, a highly-automated solar cell tester-sorter system, and magazine-based wafer handling. A single APex/spl trade/ polycrystalline silicon sheet generation system now is capable of producing 200-mm wide sheet at more than 3 meters per minute. This sheet generation rate is used as the basis for designing a single-thread solar cell manufacturing production line with an annual capacity of more than 15MW of large-area APx-8 solar cells.