Crystalline silicon based photovoltaics continues to be the dominant technology for large scale deployment of solar energy. While impressive cost gains in silicon based PV have come with scale, there remains a strong push for increased efficiencies and further lowering of manufacturing costs to achieve true grid parity. So far, however, there has not been a production proven approach that reduces the cost while maintaining or increasing the efficiency. Attempts to reduce the amount of silicon used, for example, have led to development of various kerfless wafer manufacturing approaches. While some of these approaches have shown the potential for reduced costs, they also compromise the efficiency mainly due to the inferior quality of the material.Epitaxy based kerfless silicon wafers, on the other hand, has shown the potential to reverse this trend offering lower manufacturing costs while maintaining or even enhancing the efficiency due to the high quality of the n-type and p-type silicon epitaxial (Epi) wafers. In this work, we present key aspects of Crystal Solar’s patented high throughput production silicon epitaxial reactor and its use in the manufacture of standard thickness N and P wafers. Besides the advantage of having significantly reduced cost, these Epi wafers have high quality, better mechanical strength and resistance to light inducted degradation due to significantly reduced oxygen content.
In this paper, we will describe the nature of defects and impurities in thick epitaxial-Si layers and their influence on the cell efficiency. These wafers have very low average dislocation density. Stacking faults (SFs) are the main defect in epi layers. They can occur in many configurations—be isolated, intersecting, and nested. When nested, they can be accompanied by formation of coherent twins resulting in dendritic growth, with pyramids protruding out of the wafer surface. Such pyramids create large local stresses and punch out dislocations. The main mechanism of dislocation formation is through pyramids. Stacking faults degrade solar cell performance. Analyses of the solar cells have revealed that the nested SFs have a controlling effect on the solar cell performance. A well-controlled growth can minimize defect generation and produce wafers that can yield cell efficiencies close to 20%.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.