New approaches to edge passivation of laser cut PERC solar cells

Recently the development trend in the PV industry is towards much larger wafer formats. With increasing wafer area and the resulting increase in short-circuit current at the cell level, there is also a trend towards sub-cells (solar cell cut into smaller pieces) for module integration. Using sub-cells, the resistance losses through the connection can be reduced. Modules based on sub-cells achieve higher levels of fill factors and thus a higher nominal power. However, the energy yield of such sub-cells is reduced compared to full cells due to the non-passivated laser edge. The laser cut edge causes a high recombination of the charge carriers, which negatively affects the pseudo fill factor as well as open-circuit voltage of the cell. The current work introduces two different approaches for passivating the laser separated PERC solar cells. The experiments were performed on p-type PERC monofacial cells and laser scribe and mechanical cleavage (LSMC) technique was used to obtain sub-cells from the host cells. The method ‘laser scribing and simultaneous Al doping’ increases the pFF of the cleaved cells by +0.2–0.4% abs in comparison to the reference cleaved cells whereas the method ‘laser scribing and subsequent Al doping’ shows an improvement in efficiency of the cleaved cells by + 0.2% abs .