Effect of Surface Structure on Electrical Performance of Industrial Diamond Wire Sawing Multicrystalline Si Solar Cells

We report industrial fabrication of different kinds of nanostructured multicrystalline silicon solar cells via normal acid texturing, reactive ion etching (RIE), and metal-assisted chemical etching (MACE) processes on diamond wire sawing wafer. The effect of different surface structure on reflectivity, lifetime, and electrical performance was systematically studied in this paper. The difference between industrial acid, RIE, and MACE textured multicrystalline silicon solar cells to our knowledge has not been investigated previously. The resulting efficiency indicates that low reflectivity surface structure with the size of 0.2–0.8 μm via RIE and MACE process do not always lead to low lifetime compared with acid texturing process. Both RIE and MACE process is promising candidate for high efficiency processes for future industrial diamond wire sawing multicrystalline silicon solar cells.