A variety of microstructural defects in crystalline silicon solar cells

Abstract The performance and lifetime of solar cells critically depends on bulk and surface defects. To improve performance of solar cells, localization and characterization of defects on the microscale is an important issue. This paper describes a variety of microstructural defects in crystalline silicon solar cells which appear during the cell processing steps. The set of defects have been investigated and localized using visible light emission under reversed bias voltage. A light beam induced photocurrent method allows localization of defects having impact on the sample current–voltage plot and reversed bias light emission characteristics. These are shown together with the micrographs of defective surface areas. As a result, particular defects which induce nonlinearity and local breakdown in the current–voltage plot were identified in tested solar cell structures. Furthermore, measurements at various temperatures allows to identify the breakdown mechanism of the investigated defects. An interesting result of the investigation is that the majority of defects are associated with surface inhomogeneities, but not all surface inhomogeneities act as defects.