A Novel Solar Cell Shallow Emitter Formation Process by Ion-Implantation and Dopant Modulation Through Surface Chemical Etching

Ion-implantation is an advanced technology to inject dopants for shallow junction formation. Due to the ion-induced sputtering effect at low implant energy where dopants tend to accumulate at the silicon surface, the excess ion doses can be easily removed via a surface chemical wet etching process. By taking advantage of the dose limitation characteristic, we proposed a novel method to form shallow emitters with various dopant densities. Two integration flows have been investigated: (1) wet etch after implantation before junction anneal and (2) wet etch after implantation and junction anneal. The two integration flows observed a difference in the density of doping impurities during the thermal process, which is related to the substrate recombination rates. Selective emitter (SE) structures with the two types of integration flows were characterized. Comparing the blanket emitter and SE structures with two types of etching methods, the device with wet etch before annealing process achieved the best effective carrier lifetime of 53.05 μs, which leads to a higher short circuit current density. Hence, this SE cell demonstrated a better blue response and shows an improvement in the conversion efficiency.