Study of SF 6 /N 2 O Microwave Plasma for Surface Texturing of Multicrystalline (<150 µm) Solar Substrates

Surface texturing is an imperative process to reduce the reflection of the incident light on solar cells, by enhancing sunlight diffusion into the silicon solar cells for photon generation. As a result, the current generation can be increased. In this study, the plasma texturing process with linear microwave plasma sources has been benchmarked with the industrial acidic iso-texturing process on 156×156 mm 2 multicrystalline substrates. By optimizing the plasma texturing parameters, the absolute solar cells efficiency can be increased by 4.9% for 150 µm thickness silicon substrate. The proposed process offers a significant advantage over the standard acidic iso-texturing without major modification in the existing industrial solar cells manufacturing sequence. In order to explain plasma-induced surface morphology changes, the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang (KPZ), Pétri–Brault, and Jason–Drotar models are used.