How solar cell manufacturing differs from conventional wafer & chip manufacturing? Cannot there be economies-of-scope explored to bring down solar panel costs? "Lower demand and higher prices in Solar" the well known chicken-and-egg problem is supposed to be broken by simultaneous increase in demand and supply and reduction in costs. One key hypothesis is that with increase in demands the production unit can draw economies of scale and improved technology of manufacture of silicon and cells.

However I fail to understand that with so much advancement in semiconductors driven by so wide electronic industry, is this still remain a mystery to be solved? What exactly distinguishes a wafer/cell manufacturing of a solar with a semiconductor industry? Cannot be there economies-of-scope to be explored?

Someone with direct experience in solar cell manufacturing, please share your experience and would be great if could share the process details and how it differs from intel chip process.

I guess the economy of scope is there but how much that will effect the cost of a solar cell is in question. The price per weight unit of any semi conductor product is well above solar panels.
But from technology side there is definitely a potential there. We should be leverage technology as much as possible within industry and between the industry and other industries

Economies of scale are not really relevant. Nobody could afford a 4"-on-a-side semiconductor "chip", all of the economies follow from miniaturization and functional density. Solar is hostage to W/cm2 and even concentrator systems can only improve on that by a fixed, thermal-limited amount.

The use of top-tier semiconfuctor equipment to prooduce solar cells is of course way uneconomical. So is use of high purity, thick single crystal feedstock. But any other option seems to reduce cell quality (for now).

My opinion is that the bottom (in cost of production) lies with a printing type process, roll-fed substrate and liquid-phase deposited material. Garage chemistry, refined, will probably beat out high-zoot methods, dumbed down.

Still more optimistic about concentrated solar thermal myself. Especially since way more than half of my electric bill goes to heating / cooling. And the components relating to collection can be very cheap, while conversion components are also concentrated and small (whereas the direct-PV collection and conversion, are large and per-unit-area expensive.