Porous silicon in solar cell structures

The purpose of the present paper was technology development of generation of efficient and cost-effective porous silicon (PS) based antireflection coating (ARC), which would be the best adapted to the silicon solar cell (SC) processing sequence. Owing to optimisation of anodisation process conditions an average reflection coefficient of PS in the range of 400-1000 nm was decreased to 7.59% for porous layers, grown on a polished surface, and to 1.72% for layers that were grown on textured surface. Minimisation of optical losses allowed improving short circuit current by over than 50% for mono- and multicrystalline SC that had PS based ARC formed on the frontal surface. Under this, the inclement of efficiency of these SCs was 31% and 22%, correspondingly. However, the revealed decrease in the SC open-circuit voltage with PS layer by 2.5% gives the evidence on insufficient improvement and stabilisation of passivating properties of the porous layer.