Nickel silicide for Ni/Cu contact mono-silicon solar cells

作者：Min Seon Kyu; Kim Dong Ho; Lee Soo Hong^*

来源：Electronic Materials Letters, 2013, 9(4): 433-435.

DOI：10.1007/s13391-013-0026-0

• solar cells
• mono silicon solar cells
• plating
• nickel silicide
• Ni/Cu contact
• PESC
• selective emitter

A solar cell contact needs to be as thin as possible and have high conductivity since a thick contact causes shading loss and reduced current. Plating is a very suitable method for making a metal contact, and nickel is a high conductivity metal which is easy to form into a contact using electroless plating. After the nickel is plated on the silicon substrate, the nickel contact should be fired in order to form nickel silicide. Nickel silicide is used for the seed layer of the Cu contact for silicon solar cells. In this study, we replaced the screen-printed contact of the Passivated Emitter Solar Cell (PESC) with a Ni/Cu contact that has a selective emitter. The nickel layer was used as the seed layer, adhesion layer, and Cu diffusion barrier. The main contact was formed by plating the copper. The firing conditions of a conventional furnace were varied in order to form nickel silicide. Consequently, we achieved the best solar cell efficiency of 18.15%.

• 出版日期2013-7