Plasma etching, texturing, and passivation of silicon solar cells
- Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87185-0752 (United States)
- University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87106 (United States)
- Solarex (a business unit of Amoco/Enron Solar), Frederick, Maryland 21701 (United States)
We improved a self-aligned emitter etchback technique that requires only a single emitter diffusion and no alignments to form self-aligned, patterned-emitter profiles. Standard commercial screen-printed gridlines mask a plasma-etchback of the emitter. A subsequent PECVD-nitride deposition provides good surface and bulk passivation and an antireflection coating. We used full-size multicrystalline silicon (mc-Si) cells processed in a commercial production line and performed a statistically designed multiparameter experiment to optimize the use of a hydrogenation treatment to increase performance. We obtained an improvement of almost a full percentage point in cell efficiency when the self-aligned emitter etchback was combined with an optimized 3-step PECVD-nitride surface passivation and hydrogenation treatment. We also investigated the inclusion of a plasma-etching process that results in a low-reflectance, textured surface on multicrystalline silicon cells. Preliminary results indicate reflectance can be significantly reduced without etching away the emitter diffusion. {copyright} {ital 1999 American Institute of Physics.}
- Research Organization:
- Sandia National Laboratory
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC04-94AL85000
- OSTI ID:
- 700941
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-980935--
- Journal Information:
- AIP Conference Proceedings, Journal Name: AIP Conference Proceedings Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 462; ISSN 0094-243X; ISSN APCPCS
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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