A novel way of texturing glass for microcrystalline silicon thin film solar cells application

In this paper, we present a novel way of texturing glass facilitated by ZnO:Al thin film as sacrificial layer for thin film silicon solar cell application. We name this technique zinc oxide-induced texturing (ZIT). The texturing of glass was achieved by wet etching of ZnO:Al covered glass with HF and HNO3 as etchants. We investigated the influence of the ZnO:Al layer sputtering condition, the layer thickness, and the etchant composition on the surface morphology of the textured glass. We demonstrate that we are able to control the roughness of the ZIT glass over a wide roughness range, ranging from 20 to 400 nm. Highly efficient microcrystalline silicon n-i-p solar cells were deposited on ZIT glass. The influence of the substrate morphology on the solar cell performance is also discussed. The highest efficiency for a single junction n-i-p microcrystalline silicon solar cell obtained in this work is 10.64% (Active area). Copyright (C) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.