Novel interfacial microwave heating of a layered structure has been applied to the process of low temperature annealing of titania mesoporous films for dye-sensitized solar cells. Interfacial microwave annealing dramatically enhances the cell performances as compared with conventional heating in an electric oven. The improvement of cell performance is attributed to the electron transport properties in the titania films annealed by MW resulting in longer diffusion length as compared with conventional heating. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.