Easy-to-fabricate 20% efficient large-area silicon solar cells

Recently, an innovative silicon solar cell structure has been developed at ISFH which is capable of achieving very high cell efficiencies on industrial-size wafers with a simple photolithography-free processing sequence. As the corresponding solar cells essentially rely on the application of obliquely evaporated contacts they are denoted as OECO cells. In this paper the successful up-scaling of the novel OECO process from 21% efficient 4 cm2 laboratory devices to the fabrication of large-area (⩾100 cm2) silicon solar cells is described, and independently confirmed total area efficiencies of 20% are reported for 10×10 cm2 OECO-type solar cells fabricated on p-type float-zone silicon.