Optical thermal processing for silicon solar cells

Optical Thermal Processing (OTP) can offer many advantages, such as small overall thermal budget and low power and time consumption, in a strategy focused on cost effective techniques for the preparation of the solar cells in a continuous way. We show that rapid thermal processing (RTP) in a lamp furnace can be used to perform the n+p junction of a silicon solar cell. RTP was carried out on phosphorus doped silica (SOG) films deposited on 100 silicon substrates at typical processing temperatures between 800 and 11OO degree C. Test solar cells, as good as those processed in a conventional way were made by RTP. The best efficiency was 14.9 % with a short circuit current of 32.3 mA/square cm and an open circuit voltage of 596 mV.