Novel texturing process for diamond-wire-sawn single-crystalline silicon solar cell

An urgent challenge to popularize diamond-wire-sawn single-crystalline silicon (DWS sc-Si) wafers to PV industry is to develop a proper texture process, specially eliminating its severe saw marks and forming uniform pyramid texture. Using a simple pre-polishing step with TMAH plus routine texture process, the saw marks as well as amorphous silicon layer are removed effectively, thus benefiting the formation of a random pyramid structure on DWS sc-Si wafers, and the texturing mechanism beyond was discussed. With new texture surface, DWS sc-Si cells demonstrated similar reflection ~5% and same efficiency level ~19.15% to the traditional multi-wire-slurry-sawn solar cells. The techniques present in this article can be easily scaled up in PV industry.