Effects of Low Temperature Anneal on the Interface Properties of Thermal Silicon Oxide for Silicon Surface Passivation.

High quality surface passivation has gained a significant importance in photovoltaic industry for reducing the surface recombination and hence fabricating low cost and high efficiency solar cells using thinner wafers. The formation of good-quality SiO2 films and SiO2/Si interfaces at low processing temperatures is a prerequisite for improving the conversion efficiency of industrial solar cells with better passivation. High-temperature annealing in inert ambient is promising to improve the SiO2/Si interface. However, annealing treatments could cause negative effects on SiO2/Si interfaces due to its chemical at high temperatures. Low temperature post oxidation annealing has been carried out to investigate the structural and interface properties of Si-SiO2 system. Quasi Steady State Photo Conductance measurements shows a promising effective carrier lifetime of 420 µs, surface recombination velocity of 22 cm/s and a low interface trap density (D(it)) of 4 x 10(11) states/cm2/eV after annealing. The fixed oxide charge density was reduced to 1 x 10(11)/cm2 due to the annealing at 500 degrees C. The FWHM and the Si-O peak wavenumber corresponding to the samples annealed at 500 degrees C reveals that the Si dangling bonds in the SiO2 films due to the oxygen defects was reduced by the low temperature post oxidation annealing.

Enhanced Haze Ratio on Glass by Novel Vapor Texturing Method.

State-of-the-art optical trapping designs are required to enhance the light trapping capabilities of tandem thin film silicon solar cells. The wet etch process is used to texture the glass surface by dipping in diluted acidic solutions such as HNO3 (nitric acid) and HF (hydrofluoric acid). For vapor texturing, the vapor was generated by adding silicon to HF:HNO3 acidic solution. The anisotropic etching of vapor textured wafers resulted in an etching depth of about 2.78 µm with reduced reflectance of 5%. We achieved a high haze value of 74.6% at a 540 nm wavelength by increasing the etching time and HF concentration.

Advanced Passivation Technology and Loss Factor Minimization for High Efficiency Solar Cells.

High-efficiency Si solar cells have attracted great attention from researchers, scientists, photovoltaic (PV) industry engineers for the past few decades. With thin wafers, surface passivation becomes necessary to increase the solar cells efficiency by overcoming several induced effects due to associated crystal defects and impurities of c-Si. This paper discusses suitable passivation schemes and optimization techniques to achieve high efficiency at low cost. SiNx film was optimized with higher transmittance and reduced recombination for using as an effective antireflection and passivation layer to attain higher solar cell efficiencies. The higher band gap increased the transmittance with reduced defect states that persisted at 1.68 and 1.80 eV in SiNx films. The thermal stability of SiN (Si-rich)/SiN (N-rich) stacks was also studied. Si-rich SiN with a refractive index of 2.7 was used as a passivation layer and N-rich SiN with a refractive index of 2.1 was used for thermal stability. An implied Voc of 720 mV with a stable lifetime of 1.5 ms was obtained for the stack layer after firing. Si-N and Si-H bonding concentration was analyzed by FTIR for the correlation of thermally stable passivation mechanism. The passivation property of spin coated Al2O3 films was also investigated. An effective surface recombination velocity of 55 cm/s with a high density of negative fixed charges (Qf) on the order of 9 x 10(11) cm(-2) was detected in Al2O3 films.

Correlation Between the Raman Crystallinity of p-Type Micro-Crystalline Silicon Layer and Open Circuit Voltage of n-i-p Solar Cells.

This article mainly discusses the difference between p-i-n and n-i-p type solar cells. Their structural difference has an effect on cell performance, such as open circuit voltage and fill factor. Although the deposition conditions are the same for both p-i-n and n-i-p cases, the substrate layers for depositing p-type microcrystalline silicon layers differ. In n-i-p cells, the substrate layer is p-type amorphous silicon oxide layer; whereas, in p-i-n cells, the substrate layer is ZnO:Al. The interfacial change leads to a 12% difference in the crystallinity of the p-type microcrystalline silicon layers. When the p-type microcrystalline silicon layer's crystallinity was not sufficient to activate an internal electric field, the open circuit voltage and fill factor decreased 0.075 V and 7.36%, respectively. We analyzed this problem by comparing the Raman spectra, electrical conductivity, activation energy and solar cell performance. By adjusting the thickness of the p-type microcrystalline silicon layer, we increased the open circuit voltage of the n-i-p cell from 0.835 to 0.91 V.