Fabrication and characterization of highly efficient thin-film polycrystalline-silicon solar cells based on aluminium-induced crystallization

Thin-film polycrystalline-silicon solar cells might become an alternative to bulk silicon solar cells if sufficiently high efficiencies can be obtained. In this work we made pc-Si layers using aluminium-induced crystallization and thermal CVD on alumina substrates. By using plasma texturing and optimizing the cell structure, we increased the current density of our cells and achieved a cell efficiency of 8.0%. At present, our cell efficiency seems to be mainly limited by the presence in our layers of a high density of electronically active intragrain defects. Intragrain quality improvement will therefore be very important to further increase our pc-Si cell efficiency.