Improving screen printed metallization for large area industrial solar cells based on n-type material

The screen printing metallization of p+ surfaces is one of the challenges for the industrialization of n-type solar cell concepts. We observed a significant reduction in the VOC of metallized cells as compared to the implied VOC of unmetallized cell precursors. We link this to the effect of metal contamination of the emitter. As this phenomenon was observed for all tested front side pastes we came up with a solution to effectively minimize the contaminated emitter area through a double printing step. Here we present our solar cell process and show the latest results achieved using this very method.