Development of a rapid thermal annealing process for polycrystalline silicon thin-film solar cells on glass

In this report, we discuss the influence of rapid thermal annealing (RTA) on the performance of polycrystalline Si (poly-Si) thin-film solar cells on glass where the poly-Si layers are differently prepared. The first part presents a comprehensive study of RTA treatments on poly-Si thin-films made by solid phase crystallization (SPC) (standard material of CSG Solar AG, Thalheim). By varying both plateau temperature (up to 1050 °C) and duration (up to 1000 s) of the annealing profile, we determined the parameters for a maximum open-circuit voltage (VOC). In addition, we applied our standard plasma hydrogenation treatment in order to passivate the remaining intra-grain defects and grain boundaries by atomic hydrogen resulting in a further increase of VOC. We found, that the preceding RTA treatment increases the effect of hydrogenation already at comparable low RTA temperatures. The effect on hydrogenation increases significantly with RTA temperature. In a second step we investigated the effect of the RTA and hydrogenation on large-grained poly-Si films based on the epitaxial thickening of poly-Si seed layers.