Abstract
It is long recognized that high‐quality surface cleaning is critical for an increased performance of solar cells and semiconductor devices. In this contribution, the effectiveness of UV‐ozone cleaning by comparing it against the industry standard RCAand UV‐assisted deionized water (DI‐O3) techniques has been demonstrated. UV‐ozone cleaning results in an effective surface passivation quality that is comparable to both RCAand DI‐O3 cleans, realizing a recombination current density (J0) of 7 fA cm−2 as compared to 5 and 8 fA cm−2 for RCAand DI‐O3 cleans, respectively. Repeating the UV‐ozone clean on samples (i.e., growing of UV‐ozone oxide and stripping it in HF) more than twice results in a cleaning efficiency that is nearly identical to RCAclean. Based on a high resolution transmission electron microscopy analysis, the post‐annealed thickness of the UV‐ozone oxide layer was found to reduce in comparison to the pre‐annealed condition. This is likely due to oxygen diffusion from the UV‐ozone oxide layer into the overlaying AlOx layer. Additionally, it has been found that a reduction in UV‐ozone oxide deposition time to just 5 min still provides a comparable cleaning efficiency to the RCAclean, and also results in good passivation quality (5–8 fA cm−2) on both planar and textured samples.
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