Influence of boron implantation induced defects on solar cells: Modeling the process defects

The effect of process-induced defects on the photo-generated charge-carrier lifetime and solar cell performance is critical, which will help optimize the process recipe. In this work, we attempt to quantify the effects of process-induced defects during boron implantation on the n-type silicon wafer in different annealing ambiences. We have evaluated the role of defects that can be formed during oxygen and inert ambience annealing on n-type bifacial passivated emitter rear totally diffused solar cells using a recombination current prefactor (J0). The numerically calculated J0 is calibrated with the reported experimental J0 values using two different methods: (i) Shockley–Read–Hall lifetime and (ii) effective trap-density method. In the latter method, we used the simulated defect density profiles. Both methods capture the process-induced degradation. We observed that the process-induced defects could deteriorate by almost 1% absolute efficiency for the considered annealing conditions. We found that dislocation loops alone cause an ignorable effect on terminal characteristics, but other process-induced mechanisms could dominantly degrade the cell's performance. To further support, we show that independent defects (apart from coupled defects) other than dislocation loops could explain the experimentally reported boron-implanted diodes’ J–V curves under reverse bias conditions.