High-efficiency selective boron emitter formed by wet chemical etch-back for <i>n</i>-type screen-printed Si solar cells

Abstract

Front metal contact induced recombination and resistance are major efficiency limiting factors of large-area screen-printed n-type front junction Si solar cells with homogeneous emitter and tunnel oxide passivated back contact (TOPCON). This paper shows the development of a selective boron emitter (p+/p++) formed by a screen-printed resist masking and wet chemical etch-back process, which first grows a porous Si layer and subsequently removes it. Various wet-chemical solutions for forming porous Si layer are investigated. An industrial compatible process with sodium nitrite (NaNO2) catalyst is developed to uniformly etch-back the ∼47 Ω/◻ atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposited heavily doped boron emitter to ∼135 Ω/◻ by growing a 320 nm porous Si layer within 3 min and subsequently removing it. After etching back, the boron emitter was subjected to a thermal oxidation to lower the surface concentration and the emitter saturation current density J0e. Various etched-back emitters were evaluated by measuring J0e on symmetric test structures with atomic layer deposited aluminum oxide (Al2O3) passivation. Very low J0e of 21, 14, and 9 fA/cm2 were obtained for the 120, 150, and 180 Ω/◻ etched-back emitters, respectively. A solar cell with a selective emitter (65/180 Ω/◻) formed by this etch-back technology and with an Al/Ag contact on the front and TOPCON on the back gave an open-circuit voltage (Voc) of 682.8 mV and efficiency of 21.04% on n-type Czochralski Si wafer. This demonstrates the potential of this technology for next generation high-efficiency industrial n-type Si solar cells.