Reducing the wafer thickness for c-Si solar cell fabrication is an effective approach for cost-savings. Interdigitated Back Contacts (IBC) technology is a promising candidate to be applied to thin c-Si substrates due to its potential to facilitate thin device processing: thin c-Si solar cell could be processed attached to a glass with its rear surface, where all the contacts are to be defined, still accessible. The understanding of thin IBC c-Si solar cell performance has great significance in guiding the design of such devices. In this work, we explore the performance of thin IBC c-Si solar cells by both 3D TCAD device simulations and experimental fabrication based on conventional technology developed in our research group. On one hand, an optical model is proposed using 2D ray tracing method whose results are applied to 3D ATLAS TCAD simulator which is used to simulate the electrical performance of the devices. As a result, efficiencies in the range of 20 % are expected for substrates of 10-20 µm without changing our technology. On the other hand, a ~30 µm IBC solar cell is fabricated by thinning down a previously developed IBC c-Si solar cell on conventional thick high quality substrates demonstrating a 12.1% of efficiency. The front surface passivation provided by Al2O3 is deduced by comparing with the simulation results revealing a front surface recombination velocity of about 1500 cm/s.

Peer Reviewed