The study of the influence of the layer resistivity of thin epitaxial Si cells

Epitaxial layers on heavily doped CZ substrates were grown in an APCVD epitaxial system with different epitaxial layer resistivities: 0.2, 0.5, 1.0 and 2.5 ohm.cm, in order to investigate the influence of the resistivity on the solar cell characteristics. Textured and untextured layers were compared. I-V characteristics under normalised AM 1.5 illumination, dark I-V and spectral response were measured. The efficiencies and the photogenerated current were found to increase with increasing layer resistivities in the range of their investigations.