Improved Laser-Induced Defect Passivation and Simultaneous Elimination of Light-Induced Degradation in p-Type Czochralski Silicon

Laser doping is a typical industrial method to introduce a local highly doped region in silicon solar cells to form a selective emitter. Such a process inherently introduces defects that can be a concern to the overall performance of the solar cell. Here, we investigate the effectiveness of laser-induced defect (LasID) passivation on lifetime test structures through different annealing processes, including high-temperature belt-furnace firing, low-temperature belt-furnace annealing, and an advanced hydrogenation process (AHP) for n
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laser-doped selective emitters. We demonstrate clear advantages of post treatment using a rapid 10 s AHP at 300 °C when the lifetime structures are prefired. For the examined laser speeds of 0.5–6 m/s (sheet resistances of 4--70 Ω/□), AHP is the most effective treatment method. For example, for a typical laser doping speed of 4 m/s, starting from the same effective carrier lifetime of 36.9±2.4 μs after laser-doping step for all the passivation treatments, the AHP not only surpasses the conventional approaches by showing the highest recovery of the effective carrier lifetime (∼79% compared with ∼63% and ∼41% for the firing and belt-furnace annealing treatments, respectively) and dark saturation current density reduction in the regions affected by LasIDs but also simultaneously suppresses light-induced degradation (maximum of 4% effective lifetime degradation with respect to the passivated state, as opposed to 14% and 16% degradation for the firing and belt-furnace annealing treatments, respectively) common in Cz grown boron-doped p-type monocrystalline silicon.