Implementing narrow front silver gridlines through ink jet machine for high quality contacts to silicon solar cells

In this paper we report on the evaluation of the feasibility of jetting full gridline contacts to fabricate solar cells without additional plating step. We have demonstrated, for the first time, fully ink jetted front Ag gridlines with average line width of only 56.6 μm and height of 30 μm. A high series resistance of 1.1 Ω-cm² resulted in average fill factor of 0.767 and led to average efficiency of 18.0% on 239 cm² commercial CZ wafers with sheet resistance of 65-Ω/sq. This result is very promising and leaves room for improvement, especially with optimized finger spacing, improved ink and co-firing process.