Experimental evidence of direct contact formation for the current transport in silver thick film metallized silicon emitters

Great advances have been achieved in the development of silver pastes. The use of smaller silver particles, higher silver content, and, thus, less glass frit allow modern silver pastes to contact high resistive emitters without the necessity of a selective emitter or subsequent plating. To identify the microscopic key reasons behind the improvement of silver paste, it is essential to understand the current transport mechanism from the silicon emitter into the bulk of the silver finger. Two current transport theories predominate: i) The current flows through the Ag crystallites grown into the Si emitter, which are separated by a thin glass layer or possibly in direct contact with the silver finger. ii) The current is transported by means of multistep tunneling into the silver finger across nano-Ag colloids in the glass layer, which are formed at optimal firing conditions; the formation of Ag crystallites into the Si surface is synonymous with over-firing. In this study, we contact Si solar cell emitters wi...