Lifetime degradation and regeneration in multicrystalline silicon under illumination at elevated temperature

By D. Bredemeier, D. Walter, S. Herlufsen, Jan Schmidt. 2016

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine the carrier lifetime evolution of block-cast multicrystalline silicon (mc-Si) wafers under illumination (100 mW/cm2) at elevated temperature (75°C). Samples are treated with different process steps typically applied in industrial solar cell production. We observe a pronounced degradation in lifetime after rapid thermal annealing (RTA) at 900°C. However, we detect only a weak lifetime instability in mc-Si wafers which are RTA-treated at 650°C. After completion of the degradation, the lifetime is observed to recover and finally reaches carrier lifetimes comparable to the initial state. To explain the observed lifetime evolution, we suggest a defect model, where metal precipitates in the mc-Si bulk dissolve during the RTA treatment.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f41f0bc3e2b3d11d41dab08d683c5c777e95209

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. T. Dullweber
2. Jan Schmidt

Citations in the corpus

• Industrial Silicon Solar Cells Applying the Passivated Emitter and Rear Cell (PERC) Concept—A Review (2016, background): “tion of mc-Si can be completely avoided by reducing the peak temperature of the contact firing step, which was postulated in [129] to avoid the dissolution of metal precipitates responsible”