A new method is proposed to describe the characteristics of solar cell and module in this article. By using the exact explicit analytical solutions, the current-voltage and power-voltage curves of the corresponding modules are calculated and simulated. In order to extract the parameters of the solar cells, an optimized technique is presented by using Lambert W function and polynomial curve fitting. The accuracy of the model is compared with previous methods in other work. Results have the good agreement between the fitted current-voltage curves and the experimental data. Moreover, error and statistical analyses are carried out to illustrate the accuracy of the estimated parameters and procedure suitability. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V.