• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.54-54
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• 2009

Ag thick film has been used for electrode materials with the excellent conductivity. Ag electrode is used in screen-printed silicon solar cells as a electrode material. Compared to photolithography and buried-contact technology, screen-printing technology has the merit of fabricating low-priced cells and enormous cells in a few hours. Ag paste consists of Ag powders, vehicles and additives such as frits, metal powders (Pb, Bi, Zn). Frits accelerate the sintering of Ag powders and induce the connection between Ag electrode and Si wafer. Thermophysical properties of frits and reactions among Ag, frits and Si influence on cell performance. In this study, Ag pastes were fabricated with adding different kinds of frits. After Ag pastes were printed on silicon wafer by screen-printing technology, the cells were fired using a belt furnace. The cell parameters were measured by light I-V to determine the short-circuit current, open-circuit voltage, FF and cell efficiency. In order to study the relationship between the reactivity of Ag, frit, Si and the electrical properties of cells, the reaction of frits and Si wafer on was studied with thermal properties of frits. The interface structure between Ag electrode and Si wafer were also measured for understanding the reactivity of Ag, frit and Si wafer. The excessive reactivity of Ag, frit and Si wafer certainly degraded the electrical properties of cells. These preliminary studies suggest that reactions among Ag, frits and Si wafer should optimally be controlled for cell performances.

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

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2010.11a
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• pp.43.1-43.1
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• 2010

In the crystalline silicon solar cells, the full area aluminum_back surface field(BSF) is routinely achieved through the screen-printing of aluminum paste and rapid firing. It is widely used in the industrial solar cell because of the simple and cost-effective process to suppress the overall recombination at the back surface. However, it still has limitations such as the relatively higher recombination rate and the low-to-moderate reflectance. In addition, it is difficult to apply it to thinner substrate due to wafer bowing. In the recent years, the dielectric back-passivated cell with local back contacts has been developed and implemented to overcome its disadvantages. Although it is successful to gain a lower value of surface recombination velocity(SRV), the series resistance($R_{series}$) becomes even more important than the conventional solar cell. That is, it is a trade off relationship between the SRV and the $R_{series}$ as a function of the contact size, the contact spacing and the geometry of the opening. Therefore it is essential to find the best compromise between them for the high efficiency solar cell. We have investigated the optimal design for the local back contact by using PC1D simulation.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Surface Engineering Conference
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• 2006.10a
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• pp.4-5
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• 2006

This paper represents modeling and optimization techniques for solar cell process on single-crystalline float zone (FZ) wafers with high efficiency; There were the four significant processes : i)emitter formation by diffusion, anti-reflection-coating (ARC) with silicon nitride using plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD); iii)screen-printing for front and back metallization; and iv)contact formation by firing. In order to increase the performance of solar cells, the contact formation process is modeled and optimized. This paper utilizes the design of experiments (DOE) in contact formation to reduce process time, fabrication costs. The experiments were designed by using central composite design which is composed of $2^4$ factorial design augmented by 8 axial points with three center points. After contact formation process, the efficiency of the solar cell is modeled using neural networks. This model is used to analyse the characteristics of the process, and to optimize the process condition using genetic algorithms (GA). Finally, find optimal recipe for solar cell efficiency.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2016.02a
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• pp.147.2-148
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• 2016

Light management technology is very important for thin film solar cells, which can reduce optical reflection from the surface of thin film solar cells or enhance optical path, increasing the absorption of the incident solar light. Using proper light trapping structures in hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) solar cells, the thickness of absorber layers can be reduced. Instead, the internal electric field in the absorber can be strengthened, which helps to collect photon generated carriers very effectively and to reduce light-induced loss under long-term light exposure. In this work, we introduced a chemical etching technology to make honey-comb textures on glass substrates and analyzed the optical properties for the textured surface such as transmission, reflection and scattering effects. Using ray optics and finite difference time domain method (FDTD) we represented the behaviors of light waves near the etched surfaces of the glass substrates and discussed to obtain haze parameters for the different honey-comb structures. The simulation results showed that high haze values were maintained up to the long wavelength range over 700 nm, and with the proper design of the honey-comb structure, reflection or transmission of the glass substrates can be enhanced, which will be very useful for the multi-junction (tandem or triple junction) thin film a-Si:H solar cells.

• Journal of the Speleological Society of Korea
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• no.82
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• pp.5-7
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• 2007

In this paper, p-n junction formation using screen-printed metalization and co-firing is used to fabricate high-efficiency solar cells on single- crystalline silicon substrates. In order to form high-quality contacts, co-firing of a screen-printed Ag grid on the front and Al on the back surface field is implemented. These contacts require low contact resistance, high conductivity, and good adhesion to achieve high efficiency. Before co-firing, a statistically designed experiment is conducted. After the experiment, a neural network (NN) trained by the error back-propagation algorithm is employed to model the crucial relationships between several input factors and solar cell efficiency. The trained NN model is also used to optimize the beltline furnace process through genetic algorithms.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2007.07a
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• pp.1305-1306
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• 2007

To lower the fabrication cost of silicon solar cells, a surface treatment using a dielectric barrier discharge instead of a wet cleaning technique was examined on electrode surfaces on silicon solar cells. The fill factor obtained through measuring current-voltage characteristics was evaluated, and the treated surface state was characterized by energy-dispersive X-ray. It was found that the dielectric barrier discharge effectively activated the electrode surface and the surface treatment on finger electrodes contributed greatly to improve the fill factor.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.57-61
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• 2011

To develop high efficiency crystalline solar cells, the rear surface passivation is very important. In this paper, $Al_2O_3$ films deposited by thermal ALD(atomic layer deposition) method were studied for rear surface passivation of crystalline solar cells and their passivation properties were evaluated. After the deposition of $Al_2O_3$ films on p-type Si wafers, the lifetime was increased very much due to the reduction of interface state density and the field effects of the negative fixed charge in the films. Also, optimum annealing condition and effects of SiNx capping layer were investigated. The best lifetime was obtained when the films were annealed at $400^{\circ}C$ for 15min. And the lifetime degradation of the $Al_2O_3$ films with SiNx capping layers was improved compared to those without the capping layers.

• Current Photovoltaic Research
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.120-123
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• 2020

Transparent photovoltaics (PV) are used in various applications such as building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV). However, crystalline silicon (c-Si) is not used for developing transparent PV due to its opaque nature. Here. we fabficate the three holes in 6-inch c-Si solar cells using laser scribing process with an opening area ratio of about 6.8% for transparent c-Si solar modules. Moreover, we make the shingled strings using the perforated cells. Our 7 interconnected shingled string PV cells with 21 holes show a solar to power conversion of 5.721 W. In next work, we will fabricate a transparent c-Si PV module with perforated strings.

• Solar Energy
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.23-33
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• 1997

This paper reviews the advanced solar cell structures used in space. These are the structures which incorporate the back surface field and reflectors with very shallow and lightly doped emitters. Their use in space has shown that the thinner cells are more resistive to radiation damage than the thicker ones. It has been found that the charged particles affect both the surface and bulk of the cells used in space. This causes degradation in the output power, which in effect, can be explained by the degrading diffusion length of the cells. The PERL cells showed higher BOL(beginning of life) efficiency and almost the same EOL(end of life) efficiency as structures with wrap-around contact configuration fabricated on 10 ${\Omega}cm$ resistivity substrates. This observation lead to a conclusion that, the space cells do not necessarily need to have very high BOL efficiency except in specific missions which require such.