Recombination Strength of Dislocations in High-Performance Multicrystalline/Quasi-Mono Hybrid Wafers During Solar Cell Processing

Wafers from a hybrid silicon ingot seeded in part for High Performance Multicrystalline, in part for a quasi-mono structure, are studied in terms of the effect of gettering and hydrogenation on their final Internal Quantum Efficiency. The wafers are thermally processed in different groups – gettered and hydrogenated. Afterwards, a low temperature heterojunction with intrinsic thin layer cell process is applied to minimize the impact of temperature. Such procedure made it possible to study the effect of different processing steps on dislocation clusters in the material using the Light Beam Induced Current technique with a high spatial resolution. The dislocation densities are measured using automatic image recognition on polished and etched samples. The dislocation recombination strengths are obtained by a correlation of the IQE with the dislocation density according to the Donolato model. Different clusters are compared after different process steps. The results show that for the middle of the ingot, the gettering step can increase the recombination strength of dislocations by one order of magnitude. A subsequent passivation with layers containing hydrogen can lead to a decrease in the recombination strength to levels lower than in ungettered samples.