Plasma texturing on large-area industrial grade CZ silicon solar cells

We report on an experimental study of nanostructuring of silicon solar cells using reactive ion etching (RIE). A simple mask-less, scalable RIE nanostructuring of the solar cell surface is shown to reduce the AM1.5-weighted average reflectance to a level below 1 % in a fully optimized RIE texturing, and thus holds a significant potential for improvement of the cell performance compared to current industrial standards.

The reflectance is shown to remain below that of conventional textured cells also at high angle of incidence. The process is shown to be equally applicable to mono-, multi- and quasi-mono-crystalline Si. The process was successfully integrated in fabrication of solar cells using only industry standard processes on a Czochralski (CZ) silicon starting material.

The resulting cell performance was compared to cells with conventional texturing. For cells, where the nanostructuring was not fully optimized (reflectance larger than 2 %), an efficiency of 16.5 % at 1 sun was demonstrated.