to form electronic devices. Another advantage is that a-Si can be deposited over large areas by PECVD. The design of the PECVD system has great impact on the production cost of such panel, therefore most equipment suppliers put their focus on the design of PECVD for higher throughput, that leads to lower manufacturing cost particularly when the silane is recycled. Arrays of small (under 1 mm by 1 mm) a-Si photodiodes on glass are used as visible-light image sensors in some flat panel detectors for fluoroscopy and radiography. Photovoltaics Hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) 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. Moreover, the vastly higher shunt resistance of the p-i-n device means that acceptable performance is achieved even at very low light levels. The first solar-powered calculators were already available in the late 1970s, such as the Royal Solar 1, Sharp EL-8026, and Teal Photon. More recently, improvements in a-Si:H construction techniques have made them more attractive for large-area solar cell use as well. Here their lower inherent efficiency is made up, at least partially, by their thinness – higher efficiencies can be reached by stacking several thin-film cells on top of each other, each one tuned to work well at a specific frequency of light. This approach is not applicable to c-Si cells, which are thick as a result of its indirect band-gap and are therefore largely opaque, blocking light from reaching other layers in a stack. The source of the low efficiency of amorphous silicon photovoltaics is due largely to the low hole mobility of the material. This low hole mobility has been attributed to many physical aspects of the material, including the presence of dangling bonds (silicon with 3 bonds), floating bonds (silicon with 5 bonds), as well as bond reconfigurations. While much work has been done to control these sources of low mobility, evidence suggests that the multitude of interacting defects may lead to the mobility being inherently limited, as reducing one type of defect leads to formation others. The main advantage of a-Si:H in large scale production is not efficiency, but cost. a-Si:H cells use only a fraction of the silicon needed for typical c-Si cells,