https://doi.org/10.1051/epjpv/2022005
Regular Article
Hydrogenation of sputtered ZnO:Al layers for double side poly-Si/SiOx solar cells
1
Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CEA, LITEN, DTS, SCPV, F-73370 Le Bourget-du-Lac, France
2
Univ. Grenoble Alpes, Univ. Savoie Mont-Blanc, CNRS, Grenoble INP, IMEP-LAHC, 38000 Grenoble, France
3
Ion Beam Services, Rue Gaston Imbert Prolongé, ZI Rousset-Peynier, 13790 Peynier, France
* e-mail: charles.seron@cea.fr
Received:
30
June
2021
Received in final form:
11
February
2022
Accepted:
21
February
2022
Published online: 22 April 2022
This work presents the development and the application of innovative and sustainable transparent conductive oxide (TCO) materials for contacting polysilicon (poly-Si) on oxide (SiOx) stacks used as passivating contacts in solar cell devices. Adding hydrogen into ZnO:Al (AZO) layers deposited by magnetron sputtering potentially leads to a twofold positive effect. First, it brings hydrogen atoms into the layers, which can enhance both electrical and optical material properties of the TCO. Second, hydrogen can significantly improve cell performances, by fixing dangling bonds at the SiOx/substrate interface and by passivating bulk defects. In situ and ex situ hydrogenation processes have been compared on those multiple aspects with investigation about anneals at 350 °C. AZO layers have been successfully integrated on the front side of complete solar cells featuring poly-Si/SiOx-based passivating contacts, leading to a record conversion efficiency of 22.4% for a cell with AZO. The results show that using AZO instead of an indium based TCO is suitable for passivated contacts solar cell with high temperature route. Thus, it increases the credibility towards large-scale deployments of TCO-based high efficiency silicon solar cells in terms of cost and resources.
Key words: Transparent conductive oxide / indium-free/aluminum zinc oxide / passivated contacts / poly-Si / SiOx
© C. Seron et al., Published by EDP Sciences, 2022
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
