Constraints and Trade-offs
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The main concern about ITO is the cost. ITO can be priced several times more highly than aluminium zinc oxide (AZO). AZO is a common choice of transparent conducting oxide (TCO) because of cost and relatively good optical transmission performance in the solar spectrum. However, ITO does consistently defeat AZO in almost every performance category including chemical resistance to moisture. ITO is not affected by moisture and it can survive in a CIGS cell for 25–30 years on a rooftop. While the sputtering target or evaporative material that is used to deposit the ITO is significantly more costly than AZO, consider that the amount of material placed on each cell is quite small. Therefore the cost penalty per cell is quite small too.
Read more about this topic: Indium Tin Oxide
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