Texturing industrial multicrystalline silicon solar cells

Three potential techniques for texturing commercial multicrystalline silicon solar cells are compared on the basis of reflectance measurements. Wet acidic texturing, which would be the least costly to implement, produces a modest improvement in reflection before antireflection coating and encapsulation, whereas maskless reactive-ion etching texturing, and especially masked reactive-ion etched `pyramids', generate a larger gain in absorption. After antireflection coating and encapsulation however, the differences between the methods are reduced. Short-circuit current measurements on wet acidic textured cells reveal that there is a significant additional current gain above that expected from the reduced reflection. This is attributed to both light-trapping and oblique coupling of incident light into the cell, resulting in generation closer to the junction. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.