Fabrication of buried contact silicon solar cells using porous silicon

We report the fabrication of buried contact solar cells using porous silicon as sacrificial layer to create well-defined channels (for buried contacts) in silicon. In this paper, the salient features of the technology have been presented. No detrimental effect was found in the performance of buried contact solar cell with partially filled contact area compared to the solar cells having conventional planar contacts. However, a marked difference in the short circuit current density was seen when channel was fully filled with metal by screen printing, without degradation in the open-circuit voltage. It is expected that improved processing in combination with optimized buried metallic contact parameters may yield higher efficiencies that may result in substantial decrease in solar cell cost. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.