Advances in Crystalline Silicon Solar Cell Technology

Industrial crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cells with using a screen printing technology share the global market over 90% and they will continue to be the same for at least the next decade. It seems that the $2^{nd}$ generation and the $3^{rd}$ generation technologies have not yet demonstrated competitiveness in terms of performance and cost. In 2014, new world record efficiency 25.6% (Area-$143.7cm^2$, Voc-0.740V, $Jsc-41.8mA/cm^2$, FF-0.827) was announced from Panasonic and its cell structure is Back Contact $HIT^*$ c-Si solar cell. Here, amorphous silicon passivated contacts were newly applied to back contact solar cell. On the other hand, 24.9% $TOPCon^{**}$ cell was announced from Fraunhofer ISE and its key technology is an excellent passivation quality applying tunnel oxide (<2 nm) between metal and silicon or emitter and base. As a result, to realize high efficiency, high functional technologies are quite required to overcome a theoretical limitation of c-Si solar cell efficiency. In this presentation, Si solar cell technology summarized in the International Technology Roadmap for Photovoltaics ($^{***}ITRPV$ 2014) is introduced, and the present status of R&D associated with various c-Si solar cell technologies will be reviewed. In addition, national R&D projects of c-Si solar cells to be performed by Korea University are shown briefly.