Thin-film polycrystalline-silicon (pc-Si) solar cells with a high efficiency could lower the price of photovoltaic electricity substantially. Efficient thin-film solar cells will not only lead to a cost reduction by the use of less silicon material, but will also reduce the module fabrication costs if a monolithic module process is used that integrates cell interconnection with cell contacting. Aluminium-induced crystallization (AIC) of amorphous silicon followed by epitaxial thickening recently proved to be a simple way to obtain large-grained pc-Si thin 1 films with excellent properties for solar cells. However, cell processes different from those for bulk-Si cells have to be implemented to fully exploit the pc-Si material quality and to obtain working solar cells. In this work, we propose a simple monolithic module process for thin-film pc-Si solar cells, in which all contacts are on top of the cells in an interdigitated pattern. As a first step towards implementation of this process, we made single pc-Si solar cells with interdigitated top contacts, using pc-Si layers on ceramic substrates grown by AIC in combination with high-temperature epitaxy. Next, we made pc-Si modules using a simplified metallization scheme. The interdigitated pc-Si cells had much higher efficiencies than mesa cells with base contacts at the periphery of the cells due to a lower series resistance and a higher current density. The maximum obtained cell efficiency was 5.6%, which is the highest efficiency ever achieved with pc-Si solar cells on ceramic substrates where no (re)melting of Si was involved. First module results showed that good cell separation and isolation is crucial to obtain proper working modules. Our interdigitated cell results indicate that monolithic thin-film modules with interdigitated top contacts based on pe-Si layers made by AIC will most likely lead to high efficiencies. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.