The goal of this work is to investigate morphology, electrical and optical properties of indium-tin-oxide (ITO) deposited by pyrosol on glass and Si substrates at different temperatures and to implement such layers for the processing of Si-based solar cells. The influence of the methanol/H2O ratio on general properties of ITO was investigated. Atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission spectra, ellipsometry and resistivity measurements were used for the analysis. It is shown that properties of ITO layers depend dramatically on the substrate used. It is shown that the resistivity of ITO layers deposited on a glass substrate is higher up to 2.5 times, compared to that of ITO layers deposited on a Si substrate at the same conditions, but in both cases decreases if the deposition temperature increases. Moreover, ITO layers deposited on a glass substrate are more flat and their refractive indexes are always lower for all deposition temperatures. An increase of the H2O concentration in a film-forming solution leads to a decrease of the ITO film resistivity and to a slight increase of the roughness. An application of pyrosol deposited ITO films as the top transparent electrodes for the (p(+)nn(+))Si and heterojunction ITO/n-Si solar cells is demonstrated. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.