Advanced screen printing technique for high definition front side metallization of crystalline silicon solar cells

This work presents a new, readily implementable screen printing technique for the front side metallization of textured mono- and multi-crystal line silicon solar cells. The use of a heated print chuck to increase the substrate temperature during the screen print process enables a significantly reduced printed line width for conventional and fine line screen printing. The influence of substrate temperature on the line definition is optically and electrically analysed. Within this work an efficiency gain of 1% relative as well as continuous printed lines showing a width below 60 mu m have been achieved on textured silicon surfaces at high throughput rates. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.