Millisecond annealing for advanced doping of dirty-silicon solar cells

Cost reduction is the overall goal in the further development of solar cell technologies. Multicrystalline silicon has attracted considerable attention because of its high stability against light soaking. In case of Solar Grade (SoG) mc-Si the rigorous control of metal impurities is desirable for solar cell fabrication. Although ion implantation doping got very recently distinct consideration for doping of monocrystalline solar material, efficient doping of multicrystalline solar material remains the main challenge to reduce costs. The influence of different annealing techniques on the optical and electrical properties of mc-Si solar cells was investigated. Flash Lamp Annealing in the ms-range is demonstrated here as a very promising technique for the emitter formation at an overally low thermal budget. It could be presented that FLA at 1000oC for 3 ms even without preheating is sufficient to recrystallize implanted silicon. The sheet resistance (SR) of FLA samples shows values of about 50 Ohm/sq. A specially, the minority carrier diffusion length for the FLA samples is in the range of 80 um without surface passivation. This is up to one order of magnitude higher than that observed from RTA or FA samples. This technology shows great promise to replace the conventional POCl3 –doping.