Investigation of Interdigitated Metallization Patterns for Polycrystalline Silicon Thin-Film Solar Cells on Glass

In this study, we evaluate the impact of interdigitated metallization patterns on the 1-sun performance of poly-Si thin-film solar cells on glass. We implement a model of the solar cell with an interdigitated metallization pattern in the simulation software Silvaco Atlas. Simulation and experimental results show consistently that the dominant factor for the performance of the metallization pattern is its impact on the current generation capability of the solar cell. For this reason, we study the effect of a variation of the emitter finger pitch, rear contact size, and carrier lifetime on current generation. For a pitch between 500 and 600 μm, the solar cell efficiency varies by less than 0.2% absolute. We also find that the optimum emitter finger pitch does not depend strongly on the charge carrier lifetime in the absorber layer.