Industrial Silicon Wafer Solar Cells

Texturing industrial multicrystalline silicon solar cells

Three potential techniques for texturing commercial multicrystalline silicon solar cells are compared on the basis of reflectance measurements. Wet acidic texturing, which would be the least costly to implement, produces a modest improvement in reflection before antireflection coating and encapsulation, whereas maskless reactive-ion etching texturing, and especially masked reactive-ion etched p...

Fixture-based industrial robot calibration for silicon wafer handling

1 This work was supported in part by Adept Technology, Inc. and 2000 California State MICRO Grant 00-032. 4 Sr. automation engineer, TMG, Intel Corp., 2501 NW 229 Street, Hillsboro, OR 97124. Former postdoctoral researcher in ALPHA Lab. Abstract Semiconductor manufacturing industry requires highly accurate robot operation with short downtime. We develop a fast, low cost and easy-to-operate cali...

Towards ultra-thin plasmonic silicon wafer solar cells with minimized efficiency loss

The cost-effectiveness of market-dominating silicon wafer solar cells plays a key role in determining the competiveness of solar energy with other exhaustible energy sources. Reducing the silicon wafer thickness at a minimized efficiency loss represents a mainstream trend in increasing the cost-effectiveness of wafer-based solar cells. In this paper we demonstrate that, using the advanced light...

Silicon nanowire solar cells

Silicon nanowire-based solar cells on metal foil are described. The key benefits of such devices are discussed, followed by optical reflectance, current-voltage, and external quantum efficiency data for a cell design employing a thin amorphous silicon layer deposited on the nanowire array to form the p-n junction. A promising current density of 1.6 mA /cm2 for 1.8 cm2 cells was obtained, and a ...

Epitaxial Silicon Solar Cells