Towards low cost, industrially compatible silicon heterojunction solar cells using hybrid carrier selective passivating contacts

Carrier selective passivating contacts are emerging as pivotal research interests to boost the life of solar cells based on semiconductors like silicon. These contact schemes target the final bottlenecks of contact recombination for achieving solar cells with efficiencies closer to the Shockley Queisser limit. Different material configurations are being actively explored for best figures of merit and notable compatibility with silicon. However, to make the photovoltaic technology viable for widespread implementation, industrial compatibility and an acceptable cost to-benefit ratio are the major considerations. In this paper, we have investigated a hybrid carrier selective contact scheme based on a blend of industrially adaptable tunnel oxide passivated rear and a low-cost material based front. Such a material configuration and design architecture is not reported yet. The proposed cell is modeled under different parameter variations and the electrostatics of the cell is discussed. Detailed numerical analysis for the front and rear contact design are presented and a set of optimal parameters is extracted. Further a sensitivity analysis is performed to identify the critical device design parameters which have a prominent impact on the performance of the cell. A brief comparison with the experimental and simulated solar cells infers that the proposed cell performs superior or equivalent to the existing designs with additional economic and manufacturing benefits. It is envisaged that all these production and performance metrics make the proposed architecture a viable and preferred choice to be explored for next-generation photovoltaics.