A Comprehensive Evaluation of Contact Recombination and Contact Resistivity Losses in Industrial Silicon Solar Cells

Reliable characterization techniques to accurately quantify the metallization-induced recombination losses as well as contact resistivity losses of screen-printed cells are crucial for successful optimization of the contact grid design. Previously, the dark saturation current density at the contact (J_0c) is often assumed to be constant for different finger width. Similarly, impact of finger width on contact resistivity (ρc) is rarely reported. Therefore, we performed a comprehensive evaluation of J_0c and ρ_c as a function of finger width, spacing as well as firing temperature. We found out that J0c increases from ≈2000 to ≈8100 fA/cm2, when the finger width increases from 60 to 400 μm; and ρ_c decrease from 7.2 to 2.2 mΩ · cm² when using a wide-TLM rather than a narrow-TLM structure, for samples fired at 840 °C. Based on our cross-sectional and top-down scanning electron microscopy images, we believe that the physical root cause can be explained by the difference in the microstructure formed at the metal-silicon interface during the firing process for the screen-printed contacts.