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Release of Impurities From Structural Defects in Polycrystalline Silicon Solar Cells

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2011

S. A. McHugo  and
M. Imaizumi
S. A. McHugo
Affiliation:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Advanced Light Source, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
M. Imaizumi
Affiliation:
Toyota Technological Institute, Nagoya 468, JAPAN
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Abstract

It is critical to understand the behavior of metallic impurities in polycrystalline silicon used for solar cells. These impurities significantly increase the minority carrier recombination rate and, in turn, degrade cell performance. Impurity gettering is a commonly used method to remove these impurities from the material, however, past work has suggested that impurity release from structural defects drastically limits the gettering process. Presently, there is only a limited understanding of impurity release from structural defects. In this work, a correlation between structural defects and the location of metal impurities in as-grown material is established and the release of nickel and copper from structural defects in polycrystalline silicon was studied in as-grown material and after sequential thermal treatments which dissolve the impurities into the silicon matrix. Synchrotron-based x-ray fluorescence impurity mapping with spatial resolution of ≈ 1μm, was used to determine impurity distributions after each thermal treatment.

Type
Research Article
Information
MRS Online Proceedings Library (OPL) , Volume 469: Symposium E – Defects and Diffusion in Silicon Processing , 1997 , 487
Copyright
Copyright © Materials Research Society 1997

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References

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