Impact of Phosphorus Ion Implantation Dose on the Performance of PERC Solar Cell

Passivated emitter and rear cell (PERC) silicon solar cells are currently being migrated to mainstream production in recent years. However, emitter recombination loss has become the main limiting factor in the PERC devices. The emitter region is formed using ion implantation followed by a diffusion process, and the process variables such as dose (cm
^-2
), energy (keV), diffusion time (s), and temperature (
^o
C) play a crucial role in the formation of the emitter region with desired properties such as peak doping concentration as well as the thickness of emitter region. The influence of these process variables on the performance of PERC solar cell is not investigated in the literature using process and device simulations. Therefore, to examine the emitter region performance in terms of ion implantation dose of phosphorus, an industrial standard stacked nitride-based front and back dielectric antireflective coated PERC solar cell has been designed and simulated by using Silvaco TCAD based process and device simulators. The objective is to analyze the influence of ion implantation dose of phosphorus on the performance of the PERC device while keeping the rest of the process-related parameters intact. A comprehensive analysis of the proposed research work has been studied using the current density-voltage (J-V), EQE curves and photovoltaic (PV) parameters. The PERC solar cell exhibits the highest conversion efficiency of 25.2% at the optimized phosphorus dose of 5×10
¹⁵
cm
^-2
. The PERC device under consideration reflects short circuit current density (J
SC
) of 41.78 mA/cm
²
, open-circuit voltage (V
OC
) of 0.72 V, and fill-factor (FF) of 83.57%. The reported study may open a window for the experimental work to understand the influence of phosphorus ion implantation dose on the quality of the emitter region and for further enhancement of conversion efficiency of the PERC solar cell.