Development of LASER fired contacts on silicon heterojunction solar cells for the application to rear contact structures

Abstract

In this work, we present our progress in contacting both doped and undoped a-Si:H layers using a LASER tool and show some applications for three different HJ solar cell designs: standard (p-type), rear emitter (n-type) and back contact (n-type). First, we have fabricated 25 cm2 standard and rear emitter double heterojunction (DHJ) solar cells on planar 1-5 O.cm n-type FZ c-Si wafers using intrinsic instead of the p-doped a-Si:H layers. The influence of the different parameters of the LASER firing (pitch, number of pulses and energy) has been deeply studied to find optimized conditions. Solar cells have been obtained systematically with reasonable efficiencies although we have observed that the Voc is limiting the efficiency. Finally, we have also performed the Laser Fired Contacts (LFC) on lowly-doped (p) a-Si:H layers to compare the results obtained. We have observed that the LFC of the rear emitter contact enhances both short circuit current and fill factor while keeping the same Voc (646 mV). This leads to a 0.8% absolute increase of the cell efficiency.