A considerable cost reduction could be achieved in photovoltaics if efficient solar cells could be made from polycrystalline‐silicon (pc‐Si) thin films on inexpensive substrates. We recently showed promising solar cell results using pc‐Si layers obtained by aluminum‐induced crystallization (AIC) of amorphous silicon in combination with thermal chemical vapor deposition (CVD). To obtain highly efficient pc‐Si solar cells, however, the material quality has to be optimized and cell processes different from those applied for standard bulk‐Si solar cells have to be developed. In this work, we present the different process steps that we recently developed to enhance the efficiency of pc‐Si solar cells on alumina substrates made by AIC in combination with thermal CVD. Our present pc‐Si solar cell process yields cells in substrate configuration with efficiencies so far of up to 8·0%. Spin‐on oxides are used to smoothen the alumina substrate surface to enhance the electronic quality of the absorber layers. The cells have heterojunction emitters consisting of thin a‐Si layers that yield much higher Voc values than classical diffused emitters. Base and emitter contacts are on top of the cell in interdigitated finger patterns, leading to fill factors above 70%. The front surface of the cells is plasma textured to increase the current density. Our present pc‐Si solar cell efficiency of 8% together with the fast progression that we have made over the last few years indicate the large potential of pc‐Si solar cells based on the AIC seed layer approach. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We obtained 17.9% cell efficiency on thin and large mc‐Si REC wafers using ECN's metal‐wrap‐through (MWT) concept. Optimization of several cell processing steps led to an increase of more than 2% absolute in cell efficiency. With these cells 36‐cell modules were manufactured at 100% yield in our industry scale module pilot line. The highest module efficiency obtained (as independently confirmed by JRC‐ESTI) was 17%. In this module the average cell efficiency was 17.8%; this shows a small difference between cell and module efficiency. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Hydrogenation by high temperature rapid annealing of SiNx:H is found to be very effective on the defects responsible for the carrier trapping effect in multicrystalline silicon. The passivation effect is reversible and is annihilated by a long thermal annealing. As for the passivation of deep, lifetime killing defects, the efficiency of “trap” removal by the short thermal treatment depends on the density of the SiNx:H layer. This effect is, in fact, well correlated with performance improvement observed in solar cells. The parallelism between the trap and recombination center passivation effects suggests that they originate from the same defect.