The effect of saw mark on the over-ghosting for acidic textured multicrystalline wafers with silicon nitride anti-reflectance films

The use of light-induced plating (LIP) for metallization of solar cells is attractive because of its potential simplicity in that the current driving the metal reduction process is derived from the solar cell under illumination. However, there is a challenge when applying the LIP techniques on standard acidic textured multicrystalline silicon wafers with a silicon nitride coated surface. The over-plating can cause the decrease of the solar cells efficiency mainly through the shunt or forming schottky contact, and shading losses. The main reason of over-plating on acidics, also on the alkali textured multicrystalline silicon wafers is saw mark. The over-plating on saw-damage multicrystalline silicon is still evident even the coated SiN_x:H films is proper to as the plating mask. In this work, the effect of saw marks on over-plating are examined and evaluated. Finally, the elimination of over-plating on acidic textured multicrystalline silicon cells are demonstrated.