High efficiency screen-printed solar cells on textured mono-crystalline silicon

In this paper we report on high efficiency screen-printed 4 cm solar cells fabricated on randomly textured float zone, magnetic Czochralski (MCz) and Ga-doped Cz silicon. A simple process involving POCl3 emitters, low frequency PECVD silicon nitride deposition, Al back contact print, Ag front grid print followed by co-firing of the contacts produced efficiencies of 19.0% on textured float zone, 18.2% on MCz and 17.7% on Ga-doped Cz. A combination of high sheet resistance emitter (~100 Ω-/sq.) and the surface texturing resulted in short circuit current density of 37.3 mA/cm for 0.6 Ω-cm float zone cell, 38.2 mA/cm for 4.8 Ω-cm MCz cell and 37.4 mA/cm for 1.5 Ω-cm Ga-doped Cz cell. Open circuit voltages were consistent with the base resistivity of the three materials. However, FF was highest for float zone (0.784) followed by MCz (0.759) and Ga-doped Cz (0.754). Model calculations performed using PC1D showed that, once the lifetime exceeds 200 μs for this cell design, the efficiency no longer has a strong dependence on the bulk lifetime. Instead, the performance is limited by the cell design including contacts, base resistivity, doping profiles, and front and back surface recombination velocities. Detailed analysis is performed to explain the high performance of these screen-printed cells and guidelines are provided for ≥20% efficient screen-printed cells.