Abstract
This work demonstrates that the combination of a wet-chemically grown SiO2 tunnel oxide with a highly-doped microcrystalline silicon carbide layer grown by hot-wire chemical vapor deposition yields an excellent surface passivation for phosphorous-doped crystalline silicon (c-Si) wafers. We find effective minority carrier lifetimes of well above 6 ms by introducing this stack. We investigated its c-Si surface passivation mechanism in a systematic study combined with the comparison to a phosphorous-doped polycrystalline-Si (pc-Si)/SiO2 stack. In both cases, field effect passivation by the n-doping of either the µc-SiC:H or the pc-Si is effective. Hydrogen passivation during µc-SiC:H growth plays an important role for the µc-SiC:H/SiO2 combination, whereas phosphorous in-diffusion into the SiO2 and the c-Si is operative for the surface passivation via the Pc-Si/SiO2 stack. The high transparency and conductivity of the µc-SiC:H layer, a low thermal budget and number of processes needed to form the stack, and the excellent c-Si surface passivation quality are advantageous features of µc-SiC:H/SiO2 that can be beneficial for c-Si solar cells. (© 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH &Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
Published Version
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