Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Solar Energy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/solener A review on perovskite solar cells: Evolution of architecture, fabrication techniques, commercialization issues and status Priyanka Roy a , Numeshwar Kumar Sinha a , Sanjay Tiwari b , Ayush Khare a a Thin Film Research Laboratory, Department of Physics, National Institute of Technology, G E Road, Raipur 492 010, India b School of Studies in Electronics and Photonics, Pt. Ravishankar Shukla University, Raipur 492 010, India ARTICLEINFO Keywords: Perovskite Cell architecture Fabrication Toxicity Degradation Commercialization ABSTRACT Perovskite Solar Cells (PSCs) have grabbed the attention of the researchers worldwide owing to their outstanding Photovoltaic (PV) performance. PSCs are the future of the PV technology as they are capable of generating power with performance being comparable with the leading Silicon solar cells, with the cost being lower than Silicon solar cells. The enormous potential of PSCs is evident from the fact that the efciency of these cells has risen from 3.8% to 25.2% within a decade, and it is continuously rising to date. We discuss the features making PSCs superior to contemporary PV technologies. The description of the evolution of efciency and various archi- tectures used to date has been presented. The perovskite flm fabrication techniques with some large scale perovskite solar cell manufacturing techniques are discussed. Despite positive traits, the PSCs have faced some issues, such as degradation in the presence of moisture, oxygen, and UV, toxicity, etc. The impact of these factors with various remedies adopted by researchers has been discussed. However, the instability issue raised by toxicity is not of much concern is supported in this paper. These issues creating obstacles in the path of com- mercialization of PSCs along with the commercialization road map are discussed thoroughly. 1. Introduction For last so many years, the mankind has been looking for a source of energy that is not only environmentally sustainable but is commercially viable as well. Current global power demand is about 16TW, and it is estimated that the power demand would increase beyond 30TW by 2050. Therefore, rigorous research is being carried out to get an ef- cient power generation system, as the traditional technique of burning fossil fuel would not be able to meet the hike in the power requirement. The renewable energy sources, such as tidal, hydrothermal, geothermal, wind, solar, etc. will act as a savior in the energy crises. Among the various sources of energy, solar energy is believed to be the most pro- mising and efcient one due to its availability in abundance. The un- iqueness of solar energy can also be inferred from the fact that one hour of continuous illumination of solar energy is capable of fulflling our annual power demands, if all the incident solar energy is converted into electricity. So, using PV solar cells for power generation seems to be a promising way as they convert the sunlight directly into electricity. In 1839, Edmund Becquerel was the frst to convert sunlight into electricity. In 1873, Willoughby Smith discovered photoconductivity (PC) in selenium. In 1883, Charles Fritts proposed the frst design ofPV cell, which was based on the Selenium wafers. The theory of photo- electric efect proposed by Albert Einstein in 1905 explained how light knocks out the electron from the metal surface. Later for this work, he was awarded with the Nobel Prize. In 1918, Jan Czochralski laid the foundation of Silicon (Si) based solar cells by developing a technique to grow single-crystal silicon (Si) (The History of Solar Energy, 2013). In 1954, the birth of PV occurred, when the crystalline silicon-based solar cell was developed in Bell lab, USA that had power conversion ef- ciency (PCE) of 4.5% (Chapin et al., 1954). Since then, researchers have been actively searching for a low-cost device structure and some new materials exhibiting the PV efect. As a result, second-generation solar cells came into existence. These cells were basically based upon III-V device structure, GaAs, CdTe, InP, and CIGs solar cells were introduced in the feld of solar photovoltaics (Green et al., 2018). The early 1990s came up with the third generation of solar cells with Dye-sensitized structure. In 2000s Organic Photovoltaic cells (OPV) were introduced. With growing interest in nanomaterials, intensive research work is being carried out for fnding new materials in the feld of solar devices, which are not only cheap but requires low-cost processing conditions as well. Currently, crystalline silicon solar cells dominate the market, but the factors, such as the requirement of the expensive manufacturing process and costly raw materials are urging researchers to come up with a new PV technology that has the combination of both high efciency and low-cost manufacturing. The perovskite materials are gaining huge interest among the researchers because of their brilliant PV https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2020.01.080 Received 10 December 2019; Received in revised form 22 January 2020; Accepted 29 January 2020 E-mail address: akhare.phy@nitrr.ac.in (A. Khare). Solar Energy 198 (2020) 665–688 0038-092X/ © 2020 International Solar Energy Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T