SLICE

Project Background

One key action to mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change is transitioning to sustainable energy production, notably through photovoltaic (PV) power generation. PV technologies based on silicon currently represent ∼95% of the global market and will thus be the main driving force toward the expected growth of worldwide PV installations to the multi-terawatt scale. Lately, further increase of the conversion efficiency of industrial mainstream silicon solar cells has relied on the integration of passivating contacts based on a highly-doped polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) layer on top of a thin silicon oxide (SiOx) buffer layer, so-called “poly-Si passivating contacts”.

The overall objective of SLICE is to elucidate the interrelation between the functional properties of poly-Si contacts (especially surface passivation) and their fabrication process in order to guide the developments of silicon solar cells with higher efficiency. Throughout the project, we aim to develop novel methodologies enabling the identification of the first order limitation(s) to reaching poly-Si contacts featuring better performances. These findings will help us optimize our fabrication process to eventually demonstrate poly-Si contacts providing better surface passivation.