• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
• /
• 2004.11a
• /
• pp.276-279
• /
• 2004

Plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) of silicon nitride (SiN) is a proven technique for obtaining layers that meet the needs of surface passivation and anti-reflection coating. In addition, the deposition process appears to provoke bulk passivation as well due to diffusion of atomic hydrogen. This bulk passivation is an important advantage of PECVD deposition when compared to the conventional CVD techniques. A further advantage of PECVD is that the process takes place at a relatively low temperature of 300t, keeping the total thermal budget of the cell processing to a minimum. In this work SiN deposition was performed using a horizontal PECVD reactor system consisting of a long horizontal quartz tube that was radiantly heated. Special and long rectangular graphite plates served as both the electrodes to establish the plasma and holders of the wafers. The electrode configuration was designed to provide a uniform plasma environment for each wafer and to ensure the film uniformity. These horizontally oriented graphite electrodes were stacked parallel to one another, side by side, with alternating plates serving as power and ground electrodes for the RF power supply. The plasma was formed in the space between each pair of plates. Also this paper deals with the fabrication of multicrystalline silicon solar cells with PECVD SiN layers combined with high-throughput screen printing and RTP firing. Using this sequence we were able to obtain solar cells with an efficiency of 14% for polished multi crystalline Si wafers of size 125 m square.

• Current Photovoltaic Research
• /
• v.9 no.3
• /
• pp.75-83
• /
• 2021

The tunnel oxide passivated contact (TOPCon) structure got more consideration for development of high performance solar cells by the introduction of a tunnel oxide layer between the substrate and poly-Si is best for attaining interface passivation. The quality of passivation of the tunnel oxide layer clearly depends on the bond of SiO in the tunnel oxide layer, which is affected by the subsequent annealing and the tunnel oxide layer was formed in the suboxide region (SiO, Si₂O, Si₂O₃) at the interface with the substrate. In the suboxide region, an oxygen-rich bond is formed as a result of subsequent annealing that also improves the quality of passivation. To control the surface morphology, annealing profile, and acceleration rate, an oxide tunnel junction structure with a passivation characteristic of 700 mV or more (V_oc) on a p-type wafer could achieved. The quality of passivation of samples subjected to RTP annealing at temperatures above 900℃ declined rapidly. To improve the quality of passivation of the tunnel oxide layer, the physical properties and thermal stability of the thin layer must be considered. TOPCon silicon solar cell has a boron diffused front emitter, a tunnel-SiO_x/n⁺-poly-Si/SiN_x:H structure at the rear side, and screen-printed electrodes on both sides. The saturation currents J_o of this structure on polished surface is 1.3 fA/cm² and for textured silicon surfaces is 3.7 fA/cm² before printing the silver contacts. After printing the Ag contacts, the J_o of this structure increases to 50.7 fA/cm² on textured silicon surfaces, which is still manageably less for metal contacts. This structure was applied to TOPCon solar cells, resulting in a median efficiency of 23.91%, and a highest efficiency of 24.58%, independently. The conversion efficiency of interdigitated back-contact solar cells has reached up to 26% by enhancing the optoelectrical properties for both-sides-contacted of the cells.