In this paper stable, low-resistance contacts on porous silicon have been realized by electroless nickel deposition from a very weakly alkaline solution followed by copper thickening. The porous silicon layer after nickel deposition has been analysed by x-ray diffraction, which shows that a porous silicon nickel structure is successfully achieved from the bath. FESEM studies have been performed which show that the surface morphology of the porous silicon layer remains intact after nickel-copper plating. The mean roughness of the porous silicon surface has been found to improve after nickel plating from the AFM studies. Electrical characterization shows that the J-V characteristics of the nickel-copper-plated porous silicon lateral structure contact is fairly linear up to a certain value of applied voltage. Specific contact resistance of the nickel on porous silicon has been measured for the first time and has been found to be of an order of magnitude lower than that of other metals. No significant ageing is visible in this electroless nickel contact contrary to the vacuum-evaporated nickel contact.
Electroless nickel metallization on textured front surface is carried out to fabricate large area (13~) efficient silicon solar cells. It is estabh:hed through XPS analysis that NiSi is formed at the front grid contact on the texturized surface at relatively low temperature leading to a low value of series resistance of the solar cells.
A standard sol-gel method was used to deposit ZnO thin films of suitable thickness on glass substrate.The optical characteristics of the visible to infrared range on thermal stress were critically observed. Morphological signature of the films was detected by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and the crystallite size determined by Scherrer method from XRD data were consistent with grain size estimated from spectroscopic data through Meulenkamp equation. The optical band gap value from the transmission spectrum was found to corroborate with the existing works.
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