The thickness of the cells used in this study is 3.5 mils. Si cells also require heavy crystalline substrates. Active layers, however, are driven into the crystal's surface at high temperatures via a gaseous diffusion technique. Substrate material can be subsequently removed resulting in a cross section of 2.2 mils. CIS cells are formed by the evaporation or sputtering of thin films onto various support materials.
Substrates can be thick or thin, flexible or inflexible, metallic or plastic.
In addition, deposition can occur over relatively large areas. The resulting thin film devices require no expensive crystalline support. As such they are not available in quantity with large areas. It too consists of 2.0 mil Kapton, accordion folded along thermocompression creases. The total area of this baseline blanket is 2.13 m'.