Surface passivation at low temperature of p- and n-type silicon wafers using a double layer a-Si:H/SiNx:H

Abstract Surface passivation of bare silicon or emitter region is of great importance towards high efficiency solar cells. Nowadays, this is usually accomplished by depositing an hydrogenated amorphous silicon nitride (a-SiNx:H) layer on n + p structures that serves also as an excellent antireflection layer. On the other hand, surface passivation of p-type silicon is better assured by an hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) layer but suffers from optical properties. In this paper, we reported the surface passivation of p-type and n-type silicon wafers by using an a-Si:H/SiNx:H double layer formed at low temperature (50–400 °C) with ECR-PECVD technique. We first investigated the optical properties (refraction index, reflectance, and absorbance) and structural properties by FTIR (bonds Si–H, N–H) of the deposited films. The hydrogen content in the layers was determined by elastic recoil detection analysis (ERDA). The passivation effect was monitored by measuring the minority carrier effective lifetime vs. different parameters such as deposition temperature and amorphous silicon layer thickness. We have found that a 10–15 nm a-Si film with an 86 nm thick SiN layer provides an optimum of the minority carriers’ lifetime. It increases from an initial value of about 50–70 μs for a-Si:H to about 760 and 800 μs for a-Si:H/SiNx:H on Cz-pSi and FZ-nSi, respectively, at an injection level 2 × 10 15  cm −3 . The effective surface recombination velocity, S eff , for passivated double layer on n-type FZ Si reached 11 cm/s and for FZ-pSi—14 cm/s, and for Cz-pSi—16–20 cm/s. Effect of hydrogen in the passivation process is discussed.