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Title: Dopant-Free Partial Rear Contacts Enabling 23% Silicon Solar Cells

Journal Article · · Advanced Energy Materials
ORCiD logo [1];  [2];  [1];  [1];  [3];  [3];  [1];  [1];  [3];  [4];  [3];  [3];  [1]
  1. Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
  2. Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); The Australian National Univ. (ANU) (Australia)
  3. The Australian National Univ. (ANU) (Australia)
  4. Univ. of New South Wales, New South Wales (Australia)
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Over the past five years, there has been a significant increase in both the intensity of research and the performance of crystalline silicon devices which utilize metal compounds to form carrier-selective heterocontacts. Such heterocontacts are less fundamentally limited and have the potential for lower costs compared to the current industry dominating heavily doped, directly metalized contacts. A low temperature (≤230 °C), TiOx/LiFx/Al electron heterocontact is presented here, which achieves mΩcm2 scale contact resistivities ρc on lowly doped n-type substrates. Here, as an extreme demonstration of the potential of this heterocontact, it is trialed in a newly developed, high efficiency n-type solar cell architecture as a partial rear contact (PRC). Despite only contacting ≈1% of the rear surface area, an efficiency of greater than 23% is achieved, setting a new benchmark for n-type solar cells featuring undoped PRCs and confirming the unusually low ρc of the TiOx/LiFx/Al contact. Finally, in contrast to previous versions of the n-type undoped PRC cell, the performance of this cell is maintained after annealing at 350–400 °C, suggesting its compatibility with conventional surface passivation activation and sintering steps.

Research Organization:
University of California, Berkeley, CA (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Solar Energy Technologies Office; USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES). Materials Sciences & Engineering Division
Contributing Organization:
The Australian National University (ANU); University of New South Wales (UNSW)
Grant/Contract Number:
EE0008162; AC02-05CH11231; SC0004993
OSTI ID:
1684616
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1491279; OSTI ID: 1638192
Report Number(s):
DOE-UCB-08162-3
Journal Information:
Advanced Energy Materials, Vol. 9, Issue 9; ISSN 1614-6832
Publisher:
WileyCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 71 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (4)

Functional Oxides for Photoneuromorphic Engineering: Toward a Solar Brain journal June 2019
Low‐Temperature Oxidation‐Processed Titanium Oxides as Dual‐Functional Electron‐Selective Passivation Contacts journal April 2020
Passivating contacts for crystalline silicon solar cells journal September 2019
Zn(O,S)-based electron-selective contacts with tunable band structure for silicon heterojunction solar cells journal January 2019

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