Screen Printed n-Type Silicon Solar Cells for Industrial Application

The rapid fall in module prices demands researchers to come up with substantial efficiency improvement and cost reductions in the solar cell and module processes. This paper presents a solar cell development on n-type Cz-Si substrates with homogeneous diffusion of boron emitter and phosphorous backsurface-field. The resulting solar cell is bifacial and it is fabricated using only industrial compatible techniques. The best achieved solar cell efficiency, using a screen printed and firing through metallization, on 241 cm (total area) wafers is 18.6%. Moreover, we present a new method to passivate boron emitters which substantially reduces surface recombination resulting in improved VOC of the cells. We show that internal quantum efficiencies of these n-type cells when illuminated from the frontand from the back side are identical when good quality CzSi substrates are used in the fabrication.

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