Diversified Applications of UV-Ozone Oxide: Effective Surface Clean and High-Quality Passivation

It is long recognized that the effective surface clean is critical for the increased performance of solar cell and semiconductor devices. In this contribution, we introduced the effectiveness of crystalline silicon surface clean by a simple ultraviolet-ozone (UVo) process by comparing it against the industry standard RCA and UV assisted deionized water (DiO₃) techniques. Despite being simple, UV-ozone cleaning results in an effective surface passivation quality that is comparable to both RCA and DiO₃ clean, i.e., saturation current density (J₀) of 7 fA/cm² compared to 5 fA/cm² and 8 fA/cm². In addition to the surface clean, we presented that both UVo and DiO₃ oxides can be used as a highly-quality chemical passivation to the crystalline silicon substrate, but with UVo oxide offering an improved passivation than DiO₃ oxide. Incorporating the UV}o oxide in between the interface of silicon and aluminum oxide or silicon nitride reduces J₀ by $\gt 50$%, compared to the interface without the UVo oxide.