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We present large-area n-type PERT solar cells featuring a rear boron emitter passivated by a stack of ALD Al 2 O 3 and PECVD SiO x . After illustrating the technological and fundamental advantages of such a device architecture, we show that the Al 2 O 3 /SiO x stack employed to passivate the boron emitter is unaffected by the rear metallization processes and can suppress the Shockley-Read-Hall surface recombination current to values below 2 fA/cm 2 , provided that the Al 2 O 3 thickness is larger than 7 nm. Efficiencies of 21.5% on 156-mm commercial-grade Cz-Si substrates are demonstrated in this study, when the rear Al 2 O 3 /SiO x passivation is applied in combination with a homogeneous front-surface field (FSF). The passivation stack developed herein can sustain cell efficiencies in excess of 22% and V o c above 685 mV when a selective FSF is implemented, despite the absence of passivated contacts. Finally, we demonstrate that such cells do not suffer from light-induced degradation.
In this work, we investigate the impact of light illumination on crystalline silicon surfaces passivated with inline atomic layer deposited aluminum oxide capped with plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposited silicon nitride. It is found that, for dedicated n-type lifetime samples under illumination, there is no light induced degradation (LID) but enhanced passivation. The lifetime increase happened with a much faster speed compared to the lifetime decay during dark storage, resulting in the overall lifetime enhancement for actual field application scenarios (sunshine during the day and darkness during the night). In addition, it was found that the lifetime enhancement is spectrally dependent and mainly associated with the visible part of the solar spectrum. Hence, it has negligible impact for such interfaces applied on the rear of the solar cells, for example p-type aluminum local back surface field (Al-LBSF) cells.
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