Thin layers of about 30 mum thickness were grown on upgraded metallurgical (UMG) silicon substrates by liquid phase epitaxy (LPE) from an indium solvent. Instead of adding electronic grade silicon to the solution, a melt back step was carried out before each growth process to supply silicon to the melt from the UMG-Si wafers. We present an LPE technology which is capable to be directly scaled up to a few hundred layers per run. Solar cells have been fabricated based on phosphorous paste diffusion with efficiencies up to eta = 10.0%. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.