• Journal of the Korean Solar Energy Society
• /
• v.33 no.2
• /
• pp.11-17
• /
• 2013

Silicon nitride($SiN_x:H$) deposited by radio frequency plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition(RF-PECVD) is commonly used for anti-reflection coating and passivation in crystalline silicon solar cell fabrication. In this paper, characteristics of the deposited silicon nitride was studied with change of working pressure, deposition temperature, gas ratio of $NH_3$ and $SiH_4$, and RF power during deposition. The deposition rate, refractive index and effective lifetime were analyzed. The (100) p-type silicon wafers with one-side polished, $660-690{\mu}m$, and resistivity $1-10{\Omega}{\cdot}cm$ were used. As a result, when the working pressure increased, the deposition rate of SiNx was increased while the effective life time for the $SiN_x$-deposited wafer was decreased. The result regarding deposition temperature, gas ratio and RF power changes would be explained in detail below. In this paper, the optimized condition in silicon nitride deposition for silicon solar cell was obtained as 1.0 Torr for the working pressure, $400^{\circ}C$ for deposition temperature, 500 W for RF power and 0.88 for $NH_3/SiH_4$ gas ratio. The silicon nitride layer deposited in this condition showed the effective life time of > $1400{\mu}s$ and the surface recombination rate of 25 cm/s. The crystalline silicon solar cell fabricated with this SiNx coating showed 18.1% conversion efficiency.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 2011.05a
• /
• pp.112.1-112.1
• /
• 2011

The back contact solar cell (BCSC) has several advantages compared to the conventional solar cell since it can reduce grid shadowing loss and contact resistance between the electrode and the silicon substrate. This paper presents the effect of the surface texturing of the silicon BCSC by varying the texturing depth or the texturing gap in the commercially available simulation software, ATHENA and ATLAS of the company SILVACO. The texturing depth was varied from $5{\mu}m$ to $150{\mu}m$ and the texturing gap was varied from $1{\mu}m$ to $100{\mu}m$ in the simulation. The resulting efficiency of the silicon BCSC was evaluated depending on the texturing condition. The quantum efficiency and the I-V curve of the designed silicon BCSC was also obtained for the analysis since they are closely related with the solar cell efficiency. Other parameters of the simulated silicon BCSC are as follows. The substrate was an n-type silicon, which was doped with phosphorous at $6{\times}10^{15}cm^{-3}$, and its thickness was $180{\mu}m$, a typical thickness of commercial solar cell substrate thickness. The back surface field (BSF) was $1{\times}10^{20}\;cm^{-3}$ and the doping concentration of a boron doped emitter was $8.5{\times}10^{19}\;cm^{-3}$. The pitch of the silicon BCSC was $1250{\mu}m$ and the anti-reflection coating (ARC) SiN thickness was $0.079{\mu}m$. It was assumed that the texturing was anisotropic etching of crystalline silicon, resulting in texturing angle of 54.7 degrees. The best efficiency was 25.6264% when texturing depth was $50{\mu}m$ with zero texturing gap in case of low texturing depth (< $100{\mu}m$).

• Current Photovoltaic Research
• /
• v.4 no.2
• /
• pp.31-41
• /
• 2016

n-type PERT (passivated emitter, rear totally diffused) bifacial solar cells with boron and phosphorus diffusion as p+ emitter and n+ BSF (back surface field) have attracted significant research interest recently. In this work, the influences of wafer thickness, bulk lifetime, emitter, BSF on the photovoltaic characteristics of solar cells are discussed. The performance of the solar cell is determined by using one-dimensional solar cell simulation software PC1D. The simulation results show that the key role of the BSF is to decrease the surface doping concentration reducing the recombination and thus, increasing the cell efficiency. A lightly phosphorus doped BSF (LD BSF) was experimentally optimized to get low surface dopant concentration for n type bifacial solar cells. Pre-oxidation combined with a multi-plateau drive-in, using limited source diffusion was carried out before pre-deposition. It could reduce the surface dopant concentration with minimal impact on the sheet resistance.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
• /
• v.12 no.3
• /
• pp.47-51
• /
• 2013

Current research trends of solar cells has focused on the high conversion efficiency and low-cost production technology. Passivation technology that can be easily adapted to mass production. Therefore, this study conducted experiments with aim of the following two methods for the fabrication of high-efficiency crystalline silicon solar cells. In the first task, an attempt is formation of local Al-BSF to a number of locally doped dots to increase the conversion efficiency of solar cells to reduce the loss of $V_{oc}$ overcome. The second major task, rear surface apply in $Al_2O_3/SiN_x$ stack layer, $Al_2O_3$ prominent negative fixed charge characteristics. As the result of task, Local Al-BSF and $Al_2O_3/SiN_x$ stack layer applied to the p-type single crystalline silicon solar cells, the average $V_{oc}$ of 644mV, $I_{sc}$ of 918mV and conversion efficiency of 18.70% were obtained.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
• /
• 2011.02a
• /
• pp.204-205
• /
• 2011

In thin film silicon solar cells, p-i-n structure is adopted instead of p/n junction structure as in wafer-based Si solar cells. PECVD is a most widely used thin film deposition process for a-Si:H or ${\mu}c$-Si:H solar cells. For best performance of thin film silicon solar cell, the dopant profiles at p/i and i/n interfaces need to be as sharp as possible. The sharpness of dopant profiles can easily achieved when using multi-chamber PECVD equipment, in which each layer is deposited in separate chamber. However, in a single-chamber PECVD system, doped and intrinsic layers are deposited in one plasma chamber, which inevitably impedes sharp dopant profiles at the interfaces due to the contamination from previous deposition process. The cross-contamination between layers is a serious drawback of a single-chamber PECVD system in spite of the advantage of lower initial investment cost for the equipment. In order to resolve the cross-contamination problem in single-chamber PECVD systems, flushing method of the chamber with NH3 gas or water vapor after doped layer deposition process has been used. In this study, a new plasma process to solve the cross-contamination problem in a single-chamber PECVD system was suggested. A single-chamber VHF-PECVD system was used for superstrate type p-i-n a-Si:H solar cell manufacturing on Asahi-type U FTO glass. A 80 MHz and 20 watts of pulsed RF power was applied to the parallel plate RF cathode at the frequency of 10 kHz and 80% duty ratio. A mixture gas of Ar, H2 and SiH4 was used for i-layer deposition and the deposition pressure was 0.4 Torr. For p and n layer deposition, B2H6 and PH3 was used as doping gas, respectively. The deposition temperature was $250^{\circ}C$ and the total p-i-n layer thickness was about $3500{\AA}$. In order to remove the deposited B inside of the vacuum chamber during p-layer deposition, a high pulsed RF power of about 80 W was applied right after p-layer deposition without SiH4 gas, which is followed by i-layer and n-layer deposition. Finally, Ag was deposited as top electrode. The best initial solar cell efficiency of 9.5 % for test cell area of 0.2 $cm^2$ could be achieved by applying the in-situ plasma cleaning method. The dependence on RF power and treatment time was investigated along with the SIMS analysis of the p-i interface for boron profiles.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics A
• /
• v.29A no.2
• /
• pp.55-62
• /
• 1992

Polycrystalline silicon ingots were manufactured using the casting method for polycrystalline silicon solar cells. These ingots were cut into wafers and ten n$^{+}$p type solar cells were made through the following simple process` surface etching, n$^{+}$p junction formation, metalization and annealing. For the grain boundary passivation, the samples were oxidized in O$_2$ for 5 min. at 80$0^{\circ}C$ prior to diffusion in Ar for 100 min. at 95$0^{\circ}C$. The conversion efficiency of polycrystalline silicon solar cells made from these wafers showed about 70-80% of those of the single crystalline silicon solar cell and superior conversion efficiency, compared to those of commercial polycrystalline wafers of Wacker Chemie. The maximum conversion efficiency of our wafers was indicated about 8%(without AR coating) in spite of such a simple fabrication method.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
• /
• v.10 no.1
• /
• pp.51-55
• /
• 2011

The surface passivation is one of the important methods that can improve the efficiency of solar cells and can be classified into two methods: wet-chemical passivation and film passivation. In this paper, chemical HF treatment were employed for the passivation of n-type silicon wafers and their effects were studied. To investigate film passivation effects, the silicon nitride films were also deposited by PECVD (plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition) on n-type silicon wafers treated with chemical HF. The minority carrier lifetime measurements were used for evaluation of the passivation characteristics in the all experiments steps. We confirmed that the minority carrier lifetime was improved with chemical HF treatment due to passivation effects by H-termination.

• Solar Energy
• /
• v.8 no.1
• /
• pp.68-73
• /
• 1988

In the glass/TCO/p-i-n a-Si/Al type of amorphous silicon solar cell, the effects on solar cell efficiency and metastability for the various kinds of TCO analyzed by SAM and ESCA, which was used to measure the diffusion profiles of In and Sn and the Fermi energy shifts in the TCO/p interface respectively. Indium which diffused into a-Si p-layer did not have any significant effects on the Fermi level shift of p-layer when the content of $B_2H_6/SiH_4$ in p-layer was at 1 gas%. The cell fabricated on $SnO_2$ turned out to have the best cell photovoltaic characteristics. ITO fabricated by electron beam deposition system, which was shown to have the greatest rate of diffusion of Indium in ITO/p interface produced the worst metastability among the cells tested.

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

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
• /
• v.13 no.4
• /
• pp.192-195
• /
• 2012

We reported diborane ($B_2H_6$) doped wide bandgap hydrogenated amorphous silicon oxide (p-type a-SiOx:H) films prepared by using silane ($SiH_4$) hydrogen ($H_2$) and nitrous oxide ($N_2O$) in a radio frequency (RF) plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) system. We improved the $E_{opt}$ and conductivity of p-type a-SiOx:H films with various $N_2O$ and $B_2H_6$ ratios and applied those films in regards to the a-Si thin film solar cells. For the single layer p-type a-SiOx:H films, we achieved an optical band gap energy ($E_{opt}$) of 1.91 and 1.99 eV, electrical conductivity of approximately $10^{-7}$ S/cm and activation energy ($E_a$) of 0.57 to 0.52 eV with various $N_2O$ and $B_2H_6$ ratios. We applied those films for the a-Si thin film solar cell and the current-voltage characteristics are as given as: $V_{oc}$ = 853 and 842 mV, $J_{sc}$ = 13.87 and 15.13 $mA/cm^2$. FF = 0.645 and 0.656 and ${\eta}$ = 7.54 and 8.36% with $B_2H_6$ ratios of 0.5 and 1% respectively.