Title:	Low-Area Screen Printed Contacts for Industrial Perc Solar Cells
Author(s):	Y. Zhang, L. Wang, R. Chan, C. Chan, B. Hallam
Keywords:	Screen Printing, Solar Cell, Metallization
Topic:	Silicon Materials and Cells
Subtopic:	Manufacturing & Production of Si Cells
Event:	8th World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion
Session:	1DV.4.32
Pages:	194 - 198
ISBN:	3-936338-86-8
Paper DOI:	10.4229/WCPEC-82022-1DV.4.32
Price:	0,00 EUR
Document(s):	paper

Abstract/Summary:

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Screen-printing technology has already become the dominant metallization technique for silicon solar cells in the PV industry. Despite significant progress and improvements in the performance of screen-printed contacts during the past decades, one remaining challenge for screen-printed solar cells is the formation of highly recombination-active metal/Si interfaces, which can result in substantial carrier recombination losses in screenprinted PERC solar cells and the emerging high-efficiency TOPCon solar cell technology. With the bulk and surface passivation quality continuously improving in industrial silicon solar cells, the impact of such contact recombination losses will become more and more detrimental and eventually become the limiting factor to the efficiency of screenprinted solar cells. To minimize such losses, the metal/Si interface area needs to be greatly reduced for screen-printed contacts. In this work, preliminary results on the development of two novel metallization designs are presented. Both approaches aim to significantly reduce contact recombination of screen-printed contacts via reducing the metal/Si interface areas while maintaining compatibility with current screen-printing capabilities. The fabrication of proof-ofconcept PERC solar cells with the proposed contact structures demonstrated a promising VOC gain of up to 8 mV by reducing the metal/Si interface area from ~3.1% with industrial standard H-pattern grids to 0.5% with the dash metallization design. The key challenges encountered throughout the development are identified, and potential methods to overcome these challenges and achieve higher efficiencies in future work are also discussed.