Review of Back Contact Silicon Solar Cells for Low-Cost Application

Back contact solar cells hold significant promise for increased performance in photovoltaics for the near future. Two major advantages which these cells possess are a lack of grid shading loss and coplanar interconnection. Front contacted cells can have up to 10% shading loss when using screen printed metal grids. A front contact cell must also use solder connections which run from the front of one cell to the back of the next for series interconnection. This procedure is more difficult to automate than the case of co-planar contacts. The back contact cell design is not a recent concept. The earliest silicon solar cell developed by Bell Labs was a back contact device. There have been many design modifications to the basic concept over the years. To name a few, there is the Interdigitated Back Contact (IBC) cell, the Stanford Point contact solar cell, the Emitter Wrap Through (EWT), and its many variations. A number of these design concepts have demonstrated high efficiency. The SunPower back contact solar cell holds the efficiency record for silicon concentrator cells. The challenge is to produce a high efficiency cell at low cost using high throughput techniques. This has yet to be achieved with a back contact cell design. The focus of this paper will be to review the relevant features of back contact cells and progress made toward the goal of a low cost version of this device.