The methods involve heating polycrystalline material above its melting point and slowly cooling it from one end of its container, where a seed crystal is located.

When seed crystals are not employed as described above, polycrystalline ingots can be produced from a feedstock consisting of rods, chunks, or any irregularly shaped pieces once they are melted and allowed to re-solidify.

The resultant microstructure of the ingots so obtained are characteristic of directionally solidified metals and alloys with their aligned grains.

A variant of the technique known as the horizontal directional solidification method (HDSM) developed by Khachik Bagdasarov (Russian: Хачик Багдасаров) starting in the 1960s in the Soviet Union.

[5] However, the quality of the crystals grown by HDSM differ from the Czochralski method, due to the problem of the problematic presence of bubbles.