Effects of mirror polishing brick surface on process yield of multi-wire slicing for thin single-crystalline silicon solar cells

•Thin silicon wafers with thickness of 100–140μm were sliced by multi-wire slicing.•Physical and electrical properties of thin Si wafers were investigated.•Subsurface defects of the brick surface critically determined process yield in slicing Si wafers. Thin silicon (Si) wafers with thickness of 100–140μm were obtained by using a multi-wire slicing process with a SiC slurry. We investigated the process yields of wafer slicing as well as physical/electrical properties of the sliced wafers with various thicknesses. As the wafer thickness decreases, the process yield abruptly decreased due to wafer breakage during the slicing process, and conventional polishing the brick surface was not enough to gain a considerable process yield. However, elimination of defects on the brick surface by mirror polishing resulted in an 83.1% enhancement of yield even for wafers with a thickness of 100μm. The number of wafers obtained was even higher than that of conventional 180μm-thick wafers (479 vs. 415 wafers in this research). Investigation of the microstructure of brick surfaces revealed that surface defects on bricks were main parameter to determine the yield of slicing process. Surface defects containing the micro-cracks introduced residual stress, which decreased the slicing process yield especially for thinner wafers. From measurements of physical and electrical properties, it was revealed that the relative total thickness variations (TTVs) and bowings increased and the characteristic fracture strength of sliced wafer and conversion efficiencies decreased as the wafer thickness decreased. For the wafer with thickness of 100μm, the relative TTV and bowing were 14.1% and 22.5mm, respectively. The conversion efficiency of a solar cell using this wafer was 17.6%, while that of a conventional Si solar cell using a 180μm-thick wafer was 18.4%.