A novel approach to high performance and cost effective surface cleaning for high efficiency solar cells

In this work a novel one-step wet chemical surface cleaning approach with reduced cost of ownership for the industrial realization of high efficiency silicon solar cells is evaluated in a comparative study. For this purpose investigations concerning metal removal efficiency, impact on emitter sheet resistance change, carrier lifetime and on electrical cell data are performed. In all tests a comparable performance of SELURIS® to RCA [1] cleaning can be attained by an optimization of the SELURIS® formulation. On conventional Cz wafers of 156 mm size, peak efficiencies of 19.4 % for PERC devices with SELURIS® C-2000 series cleaning are achieved.