Evidence of TiOx reduction at the SiOx/TiOx interface of passivating electron-selective contacts

• Main Authors: Cho, Jinyoun, Debucquoy, Maarten, Payo, Maria Recaman, Schapmans, Elie, Gordon, Ivan, Szlufcik, Jozef, Poortmans, Jef
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0094-243X; 1551-7616
• DOI: 10.1063/1.5049268

A TiOx layer is well known as an electron-selective contact material because of its asymmetric band offsets with respect to c-Si. When applying TiOx layers as passivating electron-selective contacts, forming sub-stoichiometric TiOx is important to obtain a low contact resistivity because oxygen vacancies increase the conductivity of TiOx and provide n-type doping effects. In this work, oxygen vacancies at SiOx/TiOx interfaces are investigated by atomic depth profiling of XPS measurements. Three kinds of TiOx layers are studied grown by either e-beam evaporation, atomic layer deposition or sputtering on c-Si. In all three TiOx samples, a resulting stack of c-Si/SiOx/TiOx could be noticed XPS measurements that show SiOx peaks near the c-Si/TiOx interface. Moreover, clear TiO2 peaks, which can be measured at the surface of all three TiOx layer types, gradually change to Ti or TiSi2 peaks near the SiOx/TiOx interface. This indicates that many oxygen vacancies seem to exist at the SiOx/TiOx interface. This TiOx reduction may contribute to the formation of a dipole and increased downward band bending resulting in a lower contact resistivity in the electron-selective contacts. As a result, hetero-junction solar cells with i-a-Si:H/TiOx/Ca/Al contacts exhibit a significant series resistance reduction of about 40 % compared to solar cells with i-a-Si:H/Ca/Al contacts.