Control of Texture Size on As-Cut Crystalline Silicon by Microparticle-Assisted Texturing (MPAT) Process

The texture size on as-cut crystalline silicon (c-Si) is drastically reduced from ~22 μm to <; 2.7 μm when mixing glass microparticles with conventional alkaline texturing solutions. The processing time and c-Si loss are considerably reduced from >15 to ~3 min and from >8 to 2 μm (for one side), respectively. Thus, this process is applicable to very thin c-Si. High-quality surface passivation with the effective minority carrier lifetimes >7 ms, corresponding to surface recombination velocity of 0.38 cm/s was possible. After anti-reflection coating, the reflectivity ~0.4% at 600nm, and <; 2% in wide wavelength 450-950nm was achieved on this new texture.