Wet chemical polishing for industrial type PERC solar cells

Industrial PERC cell process flows typically apply the polishing of the rear side after texturing as well as the edge isolation after POCl3 diffusion. In this paper, we present a novel single step polishing process which we apply post double sided texturing and diffusion in order to remove the rear emitter and to reduce the rear surface roughness. One challenge is to minimize the etch back of the front side emitter during rear side polishing due to the reactive gas phase of the polishing process. By optimizing the polishing process, we are able to limit the increase of the emitter sheet resistance below 5 Omega/seq. However, the wet cleaning post polishing contributes an additional 20 Omega/sq emitter sheet resistance increase which is subject to further optimization. We compensate the emitter sheet resistance increase due to wet cleaning by applying a 45 Omega/sq POCl3 diffusion instead of a 60 Omega/sq diffusion. The resulting PERC solar cells with polished rear surface post texture and diffusion show conversion efficiencies up to 19.6% which is comparable to the reference PERC cells which apply a rear protection layer instead of a polishing process. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.