Efficient Silver Usage in Screen-Printed SHJ Cells for the Terawatt Production Era

Enabling terawatt-scale SHJ manufacturing requires a drastic reduction in silver usage without compromising performance. We demonstrate fine-line screen-printed SHJ cells using silver (Ag), silver coated copper (AgCu), and copper (Cu) pastes on industrial precursors, delivering full-cell efficiencies around 23% comparable to pure-Ag references. Specific silver consumption drops to 2.1 mg/Wp (AgCu/AgCu) and 1.4 mg/Wp (AgCu/Cu). Fine AgCu grids printed with nominal 17 μm screen opening on wafer side achieve high effective silver utilization of ~25-30 cm²/Ωmg. Cells with pure Cu paste metallization on both sides exhibited substantial JSC and FF losses. Cells were half-cut and integrated into modules via low-temperature, wire-based soldered interconnection; cutting and module-integration losses were assessed. Under accelerated thermal cycling of modules with cells based on Ag/Ag, AgCu/AgCu as well as AgCu/Cu metallization showed ≤2% relative efficiency loss, while Cu/Cu degraded by ~7%. VOC and JSC remained stable; the degradation was dominated by FF due to increased series resistance, partially explained by occasional wire detachment. These results show that SHJ cells with AgCu/AgCu or AgCu/Cu metallization can meet TW-era silver constraints and deliver SHJ modules with substantially lower silver consumption compared to typical TOPCon.