Selective doping of silicon by rapid thermal and laser assisted processes

Abstract The selective doping technique, made by the combination of spin-on dopant (SOD) source deposition, rapid thermal annealing (RTA) and laser treatments is proposed as an innovative process for large area devices, like silicon solar cells. Rapid thermal diffusion (RTD) is first carried out from phosphorus SOD layers to form a lightly doped junction followed by pulsed laser irradiation to induce overdoping in selectively chosen regions. Here we present extensive study on the dependence of selective doping efficiency through different working variables, such as dopant source dilution, diffusion temperature and time for RTPs, and power and translation velocity for lasers. Electrical and structural characterizations have been performed by using several techniques: SIMS, stripping-Hall, four-point probe resistivity, SEM and TEM analysis. The combined use of these processes has been applied to the realization of selective emitter structures for silicon solar cells.