Rapid thermal sintering of the metallizations of silicon solar cells

Rapid thermal processing (RTP) using radiation from tungsten halogen lamps as a heat source is a very promising candidate to replace conventional furnace annealing as it offers many advantages such as a reduced overall thermal budget and a lower gas consumption. In this paper, the authors show that with moderate temperature, RTP can be used to obtain screen printed contacts with low contacts resistivity and without degrading the transport properties of the solar cell base region. They investigate on Polix multicrystalline solar cells the possibility to replace the conventional sintering by a RTP annealing of the Ag front grid and of the back Al/Ag contact in a single step performed after the antireflection coating deposition.