Rear Side Passivated and Locally Contacted Solar Cells with Laser Diffused Selective Emitter

For an improved solar cell performance rear side passivation and local contacts in combination with a laser diffused selective emitter were developed and cell efficiencies up to 19.5% were reached. Several fundamental physical impacts of major importance, such as the light trapping behaviour because of specific surface preparations, the resulting passivation performance, the interaction of emitter and rear surface recombination currents, were investi-gated. In the first test runs in a production environment average solar cell efficiencies of 18.6% and best cell efficiencies of 19.0% were successfully achieved under non-adapted production conditions.