Industrially feasible rear side concept for n-type silicon solar cells approaching 700 mV of Voc

n-Type silicon as base material offers a great potential for highly efficient solar cells. In this work we present an industrially feasible approach for the rear passivation and contacting of n-type cells on the basis of phosphorous doped amorphous silicon carbide in combination with a laser process (PassDop). The PassDop layer deposited by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) fulfills three requirements at the same time: (i) The recombination at the passivated surface is reduced to surface recombination velocities (SRV) as low as 3 cm/s. (ii) The layer acts as a dopant source during a laser process yielding local back surface fields (LBSF) underneath the metal contact points reducing the SRV at the very contact area to below 3000 cm/s. (iii) The PassDop layer in combination with evaporated aluminium results in an effective rear reflectance of 93±1 % of the cells including the metallization points. On low temperature high-efficiency n-type solar cell structures this approach proved to be extremely reproducible and led to efficiencies of up to 22.4 % (Voc=701 mV, FF=80.1 %).