Performance of solar cells fabricated on black multicrystalline Si by nanowire decoration

We demonstrate and discuss the application of nanowire surface texturing to industrial size multi-crystalline Si solar cells. A systematic study of the dependence of the solar cell parameters on the length of the nanowires was performed. We have shown that nanowire texturing can easily be incorporated into a standard cell production line, however, the charge collection efficiencies were found to be poor due to the recombination loses in the nanowires.