Experimental evidence of direct contact formation for the current transport in silver thick film metallized silicon emitters

Great advances have been achieved in the development of silver pastes. The use of smaller silver particles, higher silver content, and, thus, less glass frit allow modern silver pastes to contact high resistive emitters without the necessity of a selective emitter or subsequent plating. To identify the microscopic key reasons behind the improvement of silver paste, it is essential to understand the current transport mechanism from the silicon emitter into the bulk of the silver finger. Two current transport theories predominate: i) The current flows through the Ag crystallites grown into the Si emitter, which are separated by a thin glass layer or possibly in direct contact with the silver finger. ii) The current is transported by means of multistep tunneling into the silver finger across nano-Ag colloids in the glass layer, which are formed at optimal firing conditions; the formation of Ag crystallites into the Si surface is synonymous with over-firing. In this study, we contact Si solar cell emitters with different silver pastes on textured and flat silicon surfaces. A sequential selective silver-glass etching process is employed to expose and isolate the different contact components for current transport. The surface configurations after the etching sequences are observed with scanning electron microscopy. Liquid conductive silver is then applied to each sample and the contact resistivity is measured to determine the dominant microscopic conduction path system. We observe glass-free emitter areas at the tops of the pyramidal-textured Si that lead to the formation of direct contacts between the Ag crystallites grown into the Si emitter and the bulk of the silver finger. We present experimental evidence that the major current flow into the silver finger is through these direct contacts. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3665718]