Large area silicon solar cells with screen printed contacts have been realized for the first time on 10 cm diameter, p-type, Ct silicon wafers which were bonded to silicon substrates by alloying of a suitably thick screen printed layer of Al on them. In cells made on 300 mu m thick wafers without texturization, antireflection coating and passivation of the front surface, the values of the open-circuit voltage (V-oc), the short-circuit current density (J(sc)), curve factor (CF) and the efficiency (eta) were found to be in the range 572-579 mV, 16-19.2 mA cm(-2) 0.53-0.61 and 5.5-5.89%, respectively, under simulated tungsten halogen light of 100 mW cm(-2) intensity. Using thinner wafers and having optical confinement, surface passivation and effective back surface field, the cell performance would be substantially improved. In fact, an efficiency close to 18% (AM 1.5) would be realizable with this approach. Another attractive feature of this approach is that a low-cost silicon substrate could be used at the bottom that would act as support for the thin top surface without disadvantage to the cell performance. In this paper only the principle has been demonstrated experimentally. Possible improvements have been shown by computer simulation.