Industrial metallization of fired passivating contacts for n-type tunnel oxide passivated contact (n-TOPCon) solar cells

Poly-Si/SiOx passivating contacts enable the manufacturing of highly-efficient Si solar cells, but their fabrication commonly relies on an extra high-temperature process such as dopant diffusion or thermal annealing for achieving excellent passivation and contacting properties. This extra process is...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Solar energy materials and solar cells 2022-06, Vol.240, p.111692, Article 111692
Main Authors: Fırat, Meriç, Sivaramakrishnan Radhakrishnan, Hariharsudan, Singh, Sukhvinder, Duerinckx, Filip, Recamán Payo, María, Tous, Loic, Poortmans, Jef
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Blistering
Contact resistance
Fabrication
Fired passivating contacts
High temperature
In situ phosphorus doping
LPCVD
Metallizing
Passivity
Photovoltaic cells
Plating
Polysilicon
Recombination
Screen printing
Silver plating
Solar cells
TOPCon
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Summary:Poly-Si/SiOx passivating contacts enable the manufacturing of highly-efficient Si solar cells, but their fabrication commonly relies on an extra high-temperature process such as dopant diffusion or thermal annealing for achieving excellent passivation and contacting properties. This extra process is eliminated in the fired passivating contact (FPC) approach used for simplified fabrication of poly-Si/SiOx passivating contacts. Instead, FPCs rely on the thermal budget of the fast/short and high-temperature firing process used for metallization of solar cells to achieve similar final properties. Despite this, compatibility of FPCs with industrially viable metallization techniques has not been demonstrated yet, which is studied in this work for fire-through Ag screen-printing and Ni/Ag plating. With screen-printing, low recombination current density (J0) down to 4.9 fA/cm2, low contact resistivity between the Ag contacts and the FPC (ρc,m) down to 7.2 mΩ⋅cm2, and Ohmic transport through the FPC including the SiOx film were achieved using wet-chemically grown SiOx. Nevertheless, J0 of metallized regions (J0,m) exceeded 1000 fA/cm2. Reducing J0,m was attempted by mitigating the blistering observed in FPCs, but J0,m remained high. With Ni/Ag plating, excellent surface passivation with J0 down to 2.7 fA/cm2 and very low J0,m 
ISSN:0927-0248
1879-3398
DOI:10.1016/j.solmat.2022.111692