Further investigations in optical confinement and solar cell processing for crystalline silicon thin film solar cells

This paper presents the investigations in the performance of different SiC and SiO2 intermediate layer (IL) configurations during a zone melting recrystallisation (ZMR) step. The goal is to implement an IL consisting of an electrically conductive all-SiC multilayer stack in Recrystallised Wafer Equivalents (RexWE) solar cells. We tested stoichiometric SiC layers, carbon rich SiC layers and silicon rich SiC layers embedded in SiO2 layers, temperature pretreatments and several multilayer systems including all-SiC stacks. We also succeeded for the first time with a three layer SiC stack put together by PECVD to keep structural integrity throughout the ZMR process. Further investigation on the potential of RexWE solar cells have also been made regarding the pitch in the laser fired rear access (LFA) process and the resulting series resistance as well as the increase in the short circuit current (Jsc) due to a plasma texture.