Technology route towards industrial application of rear passivated silicon solar cells

Going beyond the standard industrial screen-printed Al-BSF rear side, this paper reports about process technologies for an industrial implementation of a rear passivated, locally contacted multicrystalline (mc) silicon solar cell. The solar cells rear side features a passivation stack system and an evaporated and LFC contacted Al layer. Due to the need of processing thinner wafers, a technology survey focuses on the adaptation of mainly inline based technologies for the realization of an industrial process scheme. New inline process technologies are introduced and compared with standard technologies. Up to date, large area mc-Si solar cells (156 x 156 mm²) fabricated completely with these inline technologies reach fill factors up to 76 %, on reference cells (125 x 125 mm²) an efficiency of 16 % is reached with an untextured front surface.