Plasma etching, texturing, and passivation of silicon solar cells

We improved a self-aligned emitter etchback technique that requires only a single emitter diffusion and no alignments to form self-aligned, patterned-emitter profiles. Standard commercial screen-printed gridlines mask a plasma-etchback of the emitter. A subsequent PECVD-nitride deposition provides good surface and bulk passivation and an antireflection coating. We used full-size multicrystalline silicon (mc-Si) cells processed in a commercial production line and performed a statistically designed multiparameter experiment to optimize the use of a hydrogenation treatment to increase performance. We obtained an improvement of almost a full percentage point in cell efficiency when the self-aligned emitter etchback was combined with an optimized 3-step PECVD-nitride surface passivation and hydrogenation treatment. We also investigated the inclusion of a plasma-etching process that results in a low-reflectance, textured surface on multicrystalline silicon cells. Preliminary results indicate reflectance can be significantly reduced without etching away the emitter diffusion.