Silicon Solar Cell Architecture with Front Selective and Rear Full Area Ion-Implanted Passivating Contacts

Abstract

In this work, the application of carrier-selective passivating contacts based on tunneling silicon-dioxide and ion-implanted poly-Si in front and rear contacted Si solar cells is presented. This paper addresses the need to minimize the contact recombination while still keeping high short circuit current. We aim to solve such trade-off with a novel solar cell architecture called Passivated Rear and Front ConTacts (PeRFeCT). Such design employs a selective passivating contact combined with standard homojunction on the front side in order to minimize contact recombination, while achieving high optical transparency and a full area passivating contact on the rear side. The opto-electrical modeling of this front/rear contacted architecture indicates a potential efficiency above 26%. As technology demonstration, we also report on the optimization of front surface field and processing of 2.8 × 2.8 cm2 wide solar cells leading to a 20.1% conversion efficiency.