We develop tools for constructing rigid analytic trivializations for Drinfeld modules as infinite products of Frobenius twists of matrices, from which we recover the rigid analytic trivialization given by Pellarin in terms of Anderson generating functions. One advantage is that these infinite products can be obtained from only a finite amount of initial calculation, and consequently we obtain new formulas for periods and quasi-periods, similar to the product expansion of the Carlitz period. We further link to results of Gekeler and Maurischat on the $\infty $-adic field generated by the period lattice.

We introduce a generalization ${\rm{\pounds}}_d^{(\alpha)}(X)$ of the finite polylogarithms ${\rm{\pounds}}_d^{(0)}(X) = {{\rm{\pounds}}_d}(X) = \sum\nolimits_{k = 1}^{p - 1} {X^k}/{k^d}$, in characteristic p, which depends on a parameter α. The special case ${\rm{\pounds}}_1^{(\alpha)}(X)$ was previously investigated by the authors as the inverse, in an appropriate sense, of a parametrized generalization of the truncated exponential which is instrumental in a grading switching technique for nonassociative algebras. Here, we extend such generalization to ${\rm{\pounds}}_d^{(\alpha)}(X)$ in a natural manner and study some properties satisfied by those polynomials. In particular, we find how the polynomials ${\rm{\pounds}}_d^{(\alpha)}(X)$ are related to the powers of ${\rm{\pounds}}_1^{(\alpha)}(X)$ and derive some consequences.

We express the number of points on the Dwork hypersurface $X_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}}^{d}:x_{1}^{d}+x_{2}^{d}+\cdots +x_{d}^{d}=d\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}x_{1}x_{2}\cdots x_{d}$ over a finite field of order $q\not \equiv 1\,(\text{mod}\,d)$ in terms of McCarthy’s $p$ -adic hypergeometric function for any odd prime $d$ .