On the way to higher efficiencies, back contact solar cells seem to be very promising. Especially, the metal wrap through (MWT) solar cell concept, with only three additional process steps when compared to conventionally processed cells. is appropriate for a fast transfer to industry. Hence, a pilot-line process based on a modified via-metallization step was set up. Therefore, a newly developed short suction step directly after the screen-printing process was established and characterized. Using this new via-metallization technique, cell efficiencies over 16% are reached on a multi-crystalline silicon (mc-Si) material. Compared with conventionally processed cells, an efficiency gain of 0.5% absolute is observed. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.