• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers C
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• v.52 no.11
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• pp.496-500
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• 2003

A low-cost, large area, random, maskless texturing scheme independent of crystal orientation is expected to significantly impact terrestrial photovoltaic technology. We investigated silicon surface microstructures formed by reactive ion etching (RIE) in Multi-Hollow cathode system. Desirable texturing effect has been achieved when radio-frequency (rf) power of about 20 Watt per one hollow cathode glow is applied for our RF Multi-Hollow cathode system. The black silicon etched surface shows almost zero reflectance in the visible region as well as in near IR region. The etched silicon surface is covered by columnar microstructures with diameters from 50 to 100 nm and depth of about 500 nm. We have successfully achieved 11.7% efficiency of mono-crystalline silicon solar cell and 10.2% multi-crystalline silicon solar cell.