Laser-doped local back surface field

Solar cell rear surface designs have become highly important due to significantly improved front surface designs in commercial solar cells and to the reduced wafer thicknesses used to reduce material cost. Most rear surface designs reported in literature are based on high quality passivation and a local back surface field. The formation of local back surface fields traditionally includes complicated and expensive processes such as photolithography and additional diffusion processes. This paper investigates a simple and relatively cheap method to create a local back surface field using laser doping.