Publikationsrepositorium - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

Multicrystalline p-type silicon wafers were used for the implantation of phosphorous. After ion implantation the silicon is strongly disordered or amorphous within the ion range. Therefore subsequent annealing is required to remove the implantation damage and to activate the doping element. The influence of the annealing types (furnace annealing - FA, rapid thermal annealing – RTA and Flash-lamp-annealing – FLA) on the optical and electrical properties of mc-Si solar cell was investigated. FLA offers here an alternative route for the emitter formation at an overall low thermal budget. During FLA, only the wafer surface is heated homogeneously to very high temperatures at ms time scales, resulting in the annealing of the implantation damage and an electrical activation of the phosphorous. However, a variation of the pulse time also allows to modify the degree of annealing of the bulk region to some extent as well, which can have an influence on the gettering behaviour of metallic bulk impurities.
The phosphorous implanted and annealed silicon wafers were characterised by means of u-Raman spectroscopy, temperature dependent photoluminescence (PL), surface photo-voltage method (SPV) and four-point probe resistor measurements. The μ-Raman spectroscopy showed that the silicon surface is amorphous after ion implantation. It could be demonstrated that FLA at 1000oC for 3 ms even without preheating is sufficient to recrystallize implanted silicon. The maximum PL intensity (band-to-band transition in silicon) was obtained from samples annealed for 3 ms, at the same time the sheet resistance (SR) of FLA samples shows the value of about 50 Ohm/sq. Moreover, the minority carrier diffusion length for the FLA samples is in the range of 100 um, what is fivefold longer than that observed from RTA or FA samples.