Advances in high efficiency crystalline silicon homo junction solar cell technology

Abstract

Due to the high energy crisis all over the world, the use of renewable energy resources such as solar energy and wind energy are becoming more common all over the world. One of the most popular types of renewable energy is solar energy. The semiconductor device that converts sunlight (solar energy) into electricity is termed as Solar cell or photovoltaic (PV) cell. Photovoltaic cells with materials involving, mainly silicon in both crystalline and amorphous form, II-IV and III-V semiconductor materials and many other inorganic and organic materials are used in this industry. Among all these materials, crystalline Silicon (c-Si) is one of the most commonly used material for photovoltaic cells because of its abundance and non-toxicity and Silicon homojunctions are the building blocks of many microelectronics devices and standard crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cells. In Silicon homo junction solar cell, the inability to absorb all the incident sunlight fundamentally limits the Si solar cell efficiency. Therefore, for single-junction devices, there is a theoretical limit for solar cell efficiency depending on the absorbing material, called the Shockley-Queisser limit. Other challenges involved in the use of silicon homo junction solar cells in the PV industry are their high manufacturing cost and lengthy manufacturing processes required for fabrication. To lower costs and increase efficiency many solution approaches such as –to reduce the number of processing steps involved in the manufacture of N-type PERT silicon solar cell, to improve the c-Si material quality, development of passivating layers to prevent surface recombination of carriers, development of metal contacts with low contact resistivity, texturing of c-Si wafer and deposition of ARC coating etc. have been proposed. This paper reviews the current methods designed and developed to achieve the high efficiency in crystalline Silicon Homo junction solar cells with low process cost.