Ricerc@Sapienza

Recently a-SiOx:H has attracted interest in heterojunction solar cells fabrication, because of its effective crystalline silicon surface passivation and larger optical bandgap than a-Si:H. Both amorphous layers are commonly deposited by PECVD from silane dissociation in hydrogen dilution. to obtain a-SiOx:H film, CO2 as source of oxygen is added to gas mixture, that heavily modifies the film growth, the composition and hydrogen inclusion, which influence the passivation properties.

The achievable current in a silicon based heterojunction solar cell is a limit in its conversion efficiency. This drawback depends on the optical band-gap of the sun-lighted amorphous layers, that reduces the light spectrum reaching crystalline silicon absorber. The search for new materials to overcome this hurdle is recently focusing its attention on hydrogenated amorphous silicon oxide (a-SiOx:H), which offers effective crystalline silicon surface passivation and optical band-gap larger than the commonly used hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H).

The adoption of a-SiOx:H films obtained by PECVD in heterojunction solar cells is a key to further increase their efficiency, because of its transparency in the UV with respect to the commonly used a-Si:H. At the same time this layer must guarantee high surface passivation of the c-Si to be suitable in high efficiency solar cell manufacturing. On the other hand the application of amorphous materials like a-Si:H and SiNx on the cell frontside expose them to the mostly energetic part of the sun spectrum, leading to a metastability of their passivation properties.