Influence of surface near doping concentration on contact formation of silver thick film contacts.pdfVIP

Solar Energy Materials Solar Cells 153 (2016) 25–30 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Solar Energy Materials Solar Cells journal homepage: /locate/solmat In?uence of surface near doping concentration on contact formation of silver thick ?lm contacts P. Rothhardt, S. Meier 1, R. Hoenig, A. Wolf, D. Biro Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE), Heidenhofstrasse 2, 79110 Freiburg, Germany article info Article history: Received 4 December 2014 Received in revised form 7 March 2016 Accepted 24 March 2016 Available online 22 April 2016 Keywords: Contact formation Current conduction Screen printing Silver contacts Doping concentration Bifacial abstract We investigate the properties of silver thick ?lm contacts on phosphorus doped alkaline textured silicon surfaces with varying surface doping levels. Using scanning electron microscopy, we ?nd that the surface near doping concentration in?uences the formation of silver crystallites especially those that are in direct contact with both the silicon surface and the contact ?nger. The observed correlation between direct silver crystallite imprint coverage and speci?c contact resistance allows for extracting the speci?c contact resistance of individual crystallites to be approximately 3.3 mΩ cm2, which agrees well with theoretical predictions. Furthermore we present a new approach that allows for a quantitative separation of direct and indirect current conduction channels. For our experimental conditions, the assumption of current conduction exclusively by transport through silver crystallites adequately describes the experimental data. Finally we fabricate bifacial n-type solar cells with peak ef?ciencies of 19.9%. 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. 1. Introduction Screen printed silver based thick ?lm metallization is the most widespread technique for contacting phosphorus-doped surfaces of industrial silicon solar cells. Even though screen printed metallization has been used for many years in the photovolta