Screen Printed Fire-Through Contact Formation for Polysilicon-Passivated Contacts and Phosphorus-Diffused Contacts

In this article, we investigate the passivation quality and electrical contact properties for samples with a 150 nm thick n+ polysilicon layer in comparison to samples with a phosphorus diffused layer. High level of passivation is achieved for the samples with n+ polysilicon layer and an interfacial oxide underneath it. The contact properties...

Influence of Silicon Substrate Surface Finish on the Screen-Printed Silver Metallization of Polysilicon-Based Passivating Contacts

Passivated contact based on a thin interfacial oxide and a highly doped polysilicon layer has emerged as the next evolutionary step to increase the efficiencies of industrial silicon solar cells. To take maximum advantage from this layer stack, it is vital to limit the losses at the metal polysilicon interface, which can be quantified as...

Advancement in screen printed fire through silver paste metallisation of polysilicon based passivating contacts

We have metallised n+ polysilicon passivated layer structures deposited by Low Pressure Chemical Vapor Deposition (LPCVD) with silver pastes. We analysed recombination at the metal contacts by photoluminescence imaging of metallised lifetime samples and found for the best paste, metal semiconductor recombination current density values (J0met)...

Electron tomography analysis of 3D interfacial nanostructures appearing in annealed Si rich SiC films

The optical and electrical properties of Si rich SiC (SRSC) solar cell absorber layers will strongly depend on interfacial layers between the Si and the SiC matrix and in this work, we analyze hitherto undiscovered interfacial layers. The SRSC thin films were deposited using a plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) technique and...

Optimizing Silicon Oxide Embedded Silicon Nanocrystal Inter-particle Distances

We demonstrate an analytical method to optimize the stoichiometry and thickness of multilayer silicon oxide films in order to achieve the highest density of non-touching and closely spaced silicon nanocrystals after annealing. The probability of a nanocrystal nearest-neighbor distance within a limited range is calculated using the...