In order to reduce production costs for silicon thin film solar cells, high-rate deposition must be achieved without any decline in the cell efficiency. We conducted the high-rate deposition of microcrystalline silicon using a very-high frequency plasma chemical-vapor-deposition process with a narrow gap length and high pressure. We found that narrow gap length was the most important condition to satisfy both highrate and high-quality deposition of microcrystalline silicon, and we have achieved cell efficiency of 8.5% with a deposition rate of 3.1 nm/s for microcrystalline silicon solar cells. (c) 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V.