Excellent surface passivation of heavily boron or phosphorus doped crystalline silicon is presented utilizing undoped hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H). For passivating boron doped crystalline silicon surfaces, amorphous silicon needs to be deposited at low temperatures 150 °C≤Tdep≤200 °C, leading to a high bandgap. In contrast, low bandgap amorphous silicon causes an inferior surface passivation of highly boron doped crystalline silicon. Boron doping in crystalline silicon leads to a shift of the Fermi energy towards the valence band maximum in the undoped a-Si:H. A simulation, implementing dangling bond defects according to the defect pool model, shows this shift in the undoped a-Si:H passivation to be more pronounced if the a-Si:H has a lower bandgap. Hence, the inferior passivation of boron doped surfaces with low bandgap amorphous silicon stems from a lower silicon-hydrogen bond energy due to this shift of the Fermi energy. Hydrogen effusion and ellipsometry measurements support our interpretation.
This paper presents amorphous silicon deposited at temperatures below 200 °C, leading to an excellent passivation layer for boron doped emitter and phosphorus doped back surface field areas in interdigitated back contact solar cells. A higher deposition temperature degrades the passivation of the boron emitter by an increased hydrogen effusion due to lower silicon hydrogen bond energy, proved by hydrogen effusion measurements. The high boron surface doping in crystalline silicon causes a band bending in the amorphous silicon. Under these conditions, at the interface, the intentionally undoped amorphous silicon becomes p-type conducting, with the consequence of an increased dangling bond defect density. For bulk amorphous silicon this effect is described by the defect pool model. We demonstrate, that the defect pool model is also applicable to the interface between amorphous and crystalline silicon. Our simulation shows the shift of the Fermi energy towards the valence band edge to be more pronounced for high temperature deposited amorphous silicon having a small bandgap. Application of optimized amorphous silicon as passivation layer for the boron doped emitter and phosphorus doped back surface field on the rear side of laser processed back contact solar cells, fabricated using four laser processing steps, yields an efficiency of 23.3%.
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