It is demonstrated that the deposition and postdeposition sintering of an antireflection (AR) coating in hydrogen acts to passivate silicon solar cells. Cells with and without an SiO2 passivating layer, coated with a TiOx/Al2O3 AR coating showed comparable enhancements in short-wavelength spectral response and in open-circuit voltage Voc after sintering at 400 °C for 5 min in a hydrogen ambient. The improvement in Voc of cells without SiO2 is attributed to front surface passivation by the AR coating during processing.
A solar cell efficiency of 17.3% (4 cm2 area) has been achieved on 11 Q-cm, n-type dendritic web silicon. This is the highest reported efficiency to date on any silicon ribbon material. Detailed characterization and modeling show that due to the reduced substrate thickness (100 pm) and long diffusion length (> 400 pm), device performance is strongly dependent on the back surface recombination velocity (S,,). In this study, an n+ phosphorus BSF was implemented to reduce the effective S, to approximately 20 cmls, and increase the device efficiency by nearly 4% (absolute) above the case of infinite S, .Additionally, thermal oxide passivation of the boron emitter was found to improve the cell performance by more than 0.5% (absolute). By extending model calculations to "mirror" solar cells (identically doped n'-p-p+ and p+-n-n+ devices with equivalent bulk lifetimes), it is shown that substrate type plays only a minor role in determining the overall device efficiency.0-7803-3767-0/97/$10.00 0 1997 lEEE 26th PVSC; Sept. 30-0ct. 3,1997; Anaheim, CA
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