The self aligned cell

de A. Gabor

Two areas of technology for fabrication of higher efficiency Si-wafer solar cells were addressed: (1) the formation of structured texturing that is an improvement over the industry-standard isotexture process for multicrystalline wafers. (2) the formation of fine line (<50 micron) metallization seed layers in a self-aligned manner where the fingers can be automatically and perfectly lined up to a selective emitter and where expensive silver screen printing paste can be mostly replaced by plating up the seed layers with silver or copper. The benefits are: a) Lower reflectivity , b) Decoupling the performance of the texture from the saw damage, thus allowing for better advances in sawing and a more robust wet process. 1366 Technologies developed 2 pilot machines for 1) deposition and patterning of low-cost resist layers to enable simultaneous Honeycomb front texturing and groove formation for multicrystalline Si wafers, and 2) fine-line dispensing of materials that are self aligned to the grooves.