Industrial screen-printed solar cells with novel atmospheric pressure dry texturing process

Reduction of surface reflection remains a key area of investigation in order to improve the light confinement of solar cells. Our one step atmospheric pressure dry etching process uses F2 gas to form nanotextures of different aspect ratios on c-Si surfaces. The developed process is expected to be economically competitive with wet-chemical texturing methods when scaled up for higher throughputs in an inline process. We have managed to reduce the weighted surface reflection dramatically up to 2% and this can potentially be lowered further.. We have optimized the surface texture that can be effectively passivated with ALD Al2O3 with reasonably low values of surface recombination velocities. First Al-BSF solar cells prepared on multicrystalline wafers using the non-optimized version of texture have reached a maximum conversion efficiency of 15.2% and primarily suffer with high recombination losses in the surface and emitter region. Our next generation solar cells with an optimized texture are expected to have significant improvement in the cell performance.