Silicide on Oxide Based Carrier Selective Front Contact for 24% Efficient PERC Solar Cell

Passivated emitter rear contact (PERC) based solar cells are currently regarded as a strong contender for large production in the photovoltaic (PV) industry owing to its superior light absorption properties. However, feasible fabrication of PERC devices with minimum contact recombination loss is a challenging task. Therefore, to diminish this factor, poly-silicon on oxide (POLO) as a carrier selective contact is employed in PERC device and processed through Silvaco-TCAD tool. In this proposed work, the concept of silicide electrostatically doped (ED) has been adopted to avoid the need for actual physical doping in polysilicon (poly-Si) layer on the front surface. Also, the impact of three different metal silicides such as ErSi
0.25
(3 eV), ErSi
0.82
(3.75 eV) and YbSi
2
(3.95 eV) to induce the n-type ED region has been studied and analyzed. The overall performance of the PERC device is investigated with the help of PV parameters, EBD, current-density (J-V) curve and EQE. ED-POLO PERC solar cell reflects higher PV parameters such as short circuit current density (J
SC
) of 40.86 mA/cm
²
, open-circuit voltage (V
OC
) of 0.728 V, fill-factor (FF) of 80.76% and power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 24.02% at optimized silicide WF of 3 eV. The reported work of silicide in carrier selective contact-based PERC device may open a path to enhance the device performance.