• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2015.08a
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• pp.82-82
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• 2015

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.

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.317-321
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• 2019

We investigated the characteristics of nano crystalline silicon(nc-Si) thin-film solar cells on graphite substrates. Amorphous silicon(a-Si) thin-film solar cells on graphite plates show low conversion efficiency due to high surface roughness, and many recombination by dangling bonds. In previous studies, we deposited barrier films by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition(PECVD) on graphite plate to reduce surface roughness and achieved ~7.8 % cell efficiency. In this study, we fabricated nc-Si thin film solar cell on graphite in order to increase the efficiency of solar cells. We achieved 8.45 % efficiency on graphite plate and applied this to nc-Si on graphite sheet for flexible solar cell applications. The characterization of the cell is performed with external quantum efficiency(EQE) and current density-voltage measurements(J-V). As a result, we obtain ~8.42 % cell efficiency in a flexible solar cell fabricated on a graphite sheet, which performance is similar to that of cells fabricated on graphite plates.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.77-79
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• 2009

Amorphous/crystalline silicon heterojunction solar cells, TCO/a-Si:H (p)/c-Si(n)/a-Si:H(n)/Al, are investigated. The influence of various parameters for the front structures was studied. We used thin (10 nm) a-Si:H(p) layers of amorphous hydrogenated silicon are deposited on top of a thick ($500{\mu}m$) crystalline c-Si wafer. This work deals with the influence of the a-Si:H(p) doping concentration on the solar cell performance is studied.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2015.08a
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• pp.257.2-257.2
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• 2015

In this paper, we report on the 10.33% efficient thin film/bulk tandem solar cells with the top cell made of amorphous silicon thin film and p-type bulk crystalline silicon bottom cell. The tunneling junction layers were used the doped nanocrystalline Si layers. It has to allow an ohmic and low resistive connection. For player and n-layer, crystalline volume fraction is ~86%, ~88% and dark conductivity is $3.28{\times}10-2S/cm$, $3.03{\times}10-1S/cm$, respectively. Optimization of the tunneling junction results in fill factor of 66.16 % and open circuit voltage of 1.39 V. The open circuit voltage was closed to the sum of those of the sub-cells. This tandem structure could enable the effective development of a new concept of high-efficiency and low cost cells.

• Journal of Surface Science and Engineering
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• v.40 no.3
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• pp.138-143
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• 2007

The effects of texturing and anti-reflection coating on the reflection properties of multi-crystalline silicon solar cell have been investigated. The chemical solutions of alkaline and acidic etching solutions were used for texturing at the surface of multi-crystalline Si wafer. Experiments were performed with various temperature and time conditions in order to determine the optimized etching condition. Alkaline etching solution was found inadequate to the texturing of multi-crystalline Si due to its high reflectance of about 25%. The reflectance of Si wafer texturing with acidic etching solution showed a very low reflectance about 10%, which was attributed to the formation of homogeneous. Also, deposition of ITO anti-reflection coating reduced the reflectance of multi-crystalline si etched with acidic solution($HF+HNO_3$) to 2.6%.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.236-240
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• 2012

Limiting thermal exposure time using rapid thermal processing(RTP) has emerged as promising simplified process for manufacturing of solar cell in a continuous way. This paper reports the simplification of co-firing using RTP. Actual temperature profile for co-firing after screen printing is a key issue for high-quality metal-semiconductor contact. The plateau time during the firing process were varied at $450^{\circ}C$ for 10~16 sec. Glass frit in Ag paste etch anti-reflection layer with plateau time. Glass frit in Ag paste is important for the Ag/Si contact formation and performances of crystalline Si solar cell. We achieved 17.14% efficiency with optimum conditions.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2013.02a
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• pp.686-686
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• 2013

Crystalline silicon solar cell is a semiconductor device that converts light into electrical energy. Screen printing is commonly used to form the front/back electrodes in silicon solar cell. Screen printing method is convenient but usually shows high resistance and low aspect ratio, which cause the efficiency decrease in crystalline silicon solar cell. Recently the plating method is applied in c-Si solar cell to reduce the resistance and improve the aspect ratio. In this paper, we investigated the effect of additional electroless Ag plating into screen-printed c-Si solar cell and compared their electrical properties. All wafers used in this experiment were textured, doped, and anti-reflection coated. The electrode formation was performed with screen-printing, followed by the firing step. Aften then we carried out electroless Ag plating by changing the plating time in the range of 20 sec~5 min and light intensity. The light I-V curve and optical microscope were measured with the completed solar cell. As a result, the conversion efficiency of solar cells was increased mainly due to the decreased series resistance.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.7-11
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• 2012

SiNx films have been wildly used as anti-reflection coatings and passivation for crystalline silicon solar cells. In this study, the SiNx films were deposited by using high frequency (13.56MHz) PECVD and optical & passivation properties were investigated. The RF power was changed in a certain range for the film deposition. Then, the refractive index, etch rate, minority carrier lifetime and cell efficiency were measured to study the properties of the film respectively. The optimal deposition conditions for application to crystalline silicon solar cells were proposed as results of the study. Finally, the best cell efficiency of 16.98% was obtained from the solar cell with the SiNx films deposited by RF power of 550W.

• Journal of the Korean Vacuum Society
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.314-318
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• 2010

We fabricated a plasma texturing for multi-crystalline silicon cells using reactive ion etching (RIE). Multi-crystalline Si cells have not benefited from the cost-effective wet-chemical texturing processes that reduce front surface reflectance on single-crystal wafers. Elimination of plasma damage has been achieved while keeping front reflectance to extremely low levels. We will discuss reflectance, quantum efficiency and conversion efficiency for multi-crystalline Si solar cell by each RIE process conditions.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2007.06a
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• pp.295-298
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• 2007

Reduction of optical losses in crystalline silicon solar cells by surface modification is one of the most important issues of silicon photovoltaics. Porous Si layers on the front surface of textured Si substrates have been investigated with the aim of improving the optical losses of the solar cells, because an anti-reflection coating(ARC) and a surface passivation can be obtained simultaneously in one process. We have demonstrated the feasibility of a very efficient porous Si ARC layer, prepared by a simple, cost effective, electrochemical etching method. Silicon p-type CZ (100) oriented wafers were textured by anisotropic etching in sodium carbonate solution. Then, the porous Si layers were formed by electrochemical etching in HF solutions. After that, the properties of porous Si in terms of morphology, structure and reflectance are summarized. The structure of porous Si layers was investigated with SEM. The formation of a nanoporous Si layer about 100nm thick on the textured silicon wafer result in a reflectance lower than 5% in the wavelength region from 500 to 900nm. Such a surface modification allows improving the Si solar cell characteristics. An efficiency of 13.4% is achieved on a monocrystalline silicon solar cell using the electrochemical technique.