PERC technology will become the next generation of crystalline silicon solar cells in mass production.To expand nowadays standard Al-BSF production lines for PERC production,two additional process steps are crucial.Manz offers modern and cost effective solutions for both of these process steps,namely PECVD passivation and Laser ablation.Concretely we report the production of firing stable rear side passivation layers which were subjected to several screen printed pastes and firing profiles.Effective surface recombination velocities between 15 to 60 cm/s on Cz industrially polished wafers are obtained,whereas the same layers applied on FZ wafers and without pastes lead to extremely well passivated surfaces,with values down to 7 cm/ s.Laser ablation was tested using several picosecond and nanosecond lasers.The laser opened regions show contact resistance as low as 20 mOhm cm2 regardless the laser employed.Furthermore,the results indicate that the electronic quality imposes efficiency limits above 22%.Therefore with a well optimized baseline process,one should be able to achieve efficiencies around 21% by applying our PECVD and laser processes.