Investigation of Isotropic Etching of Multicrystalline Silicon Wafers with Acid solution

Acid solution을 이용한 다결정 실리콘 기판의 등방성 에칭에 관한 연구

Multicrystalline silicon(mc-Si) solar cells are steadily increasing their share of the PV market due to the lower material costs. However, commercial mc-Si solar cells have lower efficiency than singlecrystalline silicon solar cells. To improve efficiency of mc-Si solar cells, it is important to reduce optical losses from front surface reflection. Isotropic etching with acid solution based on hydrofluoric acid(HF) and nitric acid$(HNO_3)$ is one of the promising methods that can reduce surface reflectance for mc-Si solar cells. Anisotropic etching is not suitable for mc-Si because of its various grain orientations. In this paper, we isotropically etched mc-Si using acid solution. After that, etched surface was observed by Scanning Electron Microscope(SEM) and surface reflectance was measured. We obtained 29.29% surface reflectance by isotropic etching with acid solution in wavelength from 400nm to 1000nm for fabrication of mc-Si solar cells.