Journal
PROGRESS IN PHOTOVOLTAICS
Volume 26, Issue 4, Pages 241-260Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/pip.2959
Keywords
amorphous semiconductors; current-voltage characteristics; heterojunctions; passivating contacts; process control; silicon; modeling and simulation
Funding
- NCN-NEEDS [1227020-EEC]
- NSF
- SRC
- Department of Science and Technology [IUSSTF/JCERDC-SERIIUS/2012]
- U.S. Department of Energy [DE-AC36-08GO28308]
- US-India Partnership to Advance Clean Energy-Research (PACE-R)
- U.S. Department of Energy (Office of Science, Government of India through the Department of Science and Technology) [DE-AC36-08GO28308 IUSSTF/JCERDC-SERIIUS/2012]
- U.S. Department of Energy (Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Government of India through the Department of Science and Technology) [DE-AC36-08GO28308 IUSSTF/JCERDC-SERIIUS/2012]
- U.S. Department of Energy (Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Solar Energy Technology Program, Government of India through the Department of Science and Technology) [DE-AC36-08GO28308 IUSSTF/JCERDC-SERIIUS/2012]
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The device physics of commercially dominant diffused-junction silicon solar cells is well understood, allowing sophisticated optimization of this class of devices. Recently, so-called passivating-contact solar cell technologies have become prominent, with Kaneka setting the world's silicon solar cell efficiency record of 26.63% using silicon heterojunction contacts in an interdigitated configuration. Although passivating-contact solar cells are remarkably efficient, their underlying device physics is not yet completely understood, not in the least because they are constructed from diverse materials that may introduce electronic barriers in the current flow. To bridge this gap in understanding, we explore the device physics of passivating contact silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells. Here, we identify the key properties of heterojunctions that affect cell efficiency, analyze the dependence of key heterojunction properties on carrier transport under light and dark conditions, provide a self-consistent multiprobe approach to extract heterojunction parameters using several characterization techniques (including dark J-V, light J-V, C-V, admittance spectroscopy, and Suns-Voc), propose design guidelines to address bottlenecks in energy production in SHJ cells, and develop a process-to-module modeling framework to establish the module's performance limits. We expect that our proposed guidelines resulting from this multiscale and self-consistent framework will improve the performance of future SHJ cells as well as other passivating contact-based solar cells.
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