Nickel assisted chemical etching for multi-crystalline Si solar cell texturing: a low cost single step alternative to existing methods

The texturing of silicon surfaces is a well-known method of reducing the reflection from the surface of crystalline Si solar cell devices. With the utilization of diamond wires in recent advances in wafer slicing technology, surface texturing for the multi-crystalline Si wafers by the traditional acid-based texturing technique has become difficult. Metal-Assisted Etching (MAE) has been shown to be a promising and low-cost alternative to the traditional acid-based isotropic texturing. This paper reports, for the first time, a new single-step Ni-assisted etching technique to obtain nano-scale porous structures, that is, black silicon on multi-crystalline wafers. We observed lower reflection results in comparison with standard isotropic texturing using a standard acid solution. The structural and optical properties of the surface were identified through reflection measurements and scanning electron microscopy imaging. As a final step, the optimized texturing process was applied to multi-crystalline solar cell devices and showed promising results regarding cell performance parameters.