Phosphorus treatment to promote crystallinity of the microcrystalline silicon front contact layers for highly efficient heterojunction solar cells

The current loss is mainly due to the reflection and the parasitic absorption in the indium tin oxide (ITO) and amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) in the front side of silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells. In this paper, we implemented n-type hydrogenated microcrystalline silicon oxide (n-μc-SiOx:H) as the front surface field (FSF) to improve the short-circuit current density (JSC) of SHJ solar cells. The advantage of employing n-μc-SiOx:H layer is due to its low optical absorption coefficient and tunable refractive index. However, the introduction of carbon dioxide increases light transmission but reduces the crystallinity of n-μc-SiOx:H layer. Meanwhile, inhibiting the incubation layer and increasing microcrystalline/amorphous mixture phase during the growth are critical to the solar cell performance. Therefore, we implemented a high phosphorus-doping seed layer to form a nucleation layer to improve the crystallinity of n-μc-SiOx:H layer. In addition, the plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) process parameters of each layer were optimized to obtain good optical and electrical properties of n-μc-SiOx:H layer. Finally, a 242.5 cm2 solar cell had been fabricated with conversion efficiency of 23.87%, open-circuit voltage (VOC) of 739.8 mV, fill factor (FF) of 82.33% and JSC of 39.19 mA/cm2, which was 0.31 mA/cm2 higher than that of the conventional n type a-Si:H SHJ solar cells.