Development of solar cells in n-type silicon with emitter formed with Boron

The Sun is a renewable energy source and its use to produce electric energy is one of the promising alternatives to address energetic and environmental challenges of the new millennium. Silicon is the second most abundant element in Earth. This semiconductor material is widely used in the manufacturing of solar cells and microelectronic devices and it allows the fabrication of high durability devices. The n-type Si is attracting worldwide interest because of its reduced degradation and higher minority carrier lifetime when compared to p-silicon. This work focuses on the development of a process to fabricate industrial p+nn+ solar cells, pseudo-square of 80 mm x 80 mm, by using n-type float zone silicon (FZ-Si), with metal grid deposited by screen-printing. The p+ region was formed by using boron spin-on dopant and diffusion in conventional quartz-tube furnaces at high temperature. Boron doping was optimized taking into account the solar cell electric characteristics. Temperature of boron diffusion was varied from 900 degrees C to 1020 degrees C and diffusion time from 10 min to 40 min. Surface passivation was implemented by using a SiO2 layer and it was not effective to reduce the surface recombination. Best devices were fabricated with boron diffusion at 1000 degrees C by 30 min, achieving the efficiency of 14.6 %.