We have investigated in this work the effect of the temperature profile during homogeneous phosphorous diffusion gettering (PDG) on multicrystalline (mc-Si) silicon p-type wafers destined for photovoltaic solar cells. Temperatures were varied from 800 • C due probably to a partial dissolution of the metallic precipitates, especially at the grain boundaries and in the dislocations vicinity. The related τCr-Impurity lifetime value of about 8.5 µs is extracted, which is the result of interstitial Cri or CriBs pairs, proving their strongest recombination activity in silicon.
In this paper, we present an appropriate method of decoupling surface and bulk recombination processes in silicon wafers. The study was carried out using the surface passivation of multicrystalline silicon wafers by ethanolic solution of iodine at different molarities varying between 0.01 M and 0.1 M. The effect of the concentration of ethanolic iodine solution on surface passivation effectiveness was investigated by using quasi steady state photoconductance technique. Reproducible experiments have shown that the best passivation is reached for a molarity of around 0.02 M. The carrier lifetime after passivation at 0.02 M has been improved by more than one order of magnitude, compared to that of the same wafer before the passivation. Using an adequate modeling of minority carrier lifetime curves τ (∆n), based on Hornbeck-Haynes model, surface recombination velocity was calculated.The minimum values of surface recombination velocity have been found to be approximately 120 cm/s for 0.02 M. The modeling results indicate that the minority carrier lifetime improvement can be easily correlated with the decrease of the surface recombination velocity for a fixed bulk lifetime τ b = 115 µs.
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