Heterojunction cells are an approach to reducing recombination losses near contacts in single junction silicon cells. Sanyo (now Panasonic) developed them in the 1990s and has shipped gigawatts of them. It's the same Panasonic cell technology that SolarCity (now Tesla) is expected to use in their New York factory. The vanilla heterojunction cell design is actually one of the simplest high-efficiency cells in terms of process flow. The main drawbacks are patents (until recently) and the limited heat tolerance of a-Si layers; standard screen printed silver metallization, fired at high temperatures, does not work for these cells.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stefaan_De_Wolf/publica...

I spent some time reading that, thank you very much for the pointers. Looks like you are right and this is in fact something that might just happen. Here's to hoping that it does.