Minority carrier lifetime of silicon wafer passivated by PECVD amorphous silicon layers for silicon heterojunction solar cells

Passivation is the one of important factors in the solar cells. The measurement of effectiveness of the passivation layer was based on quasi-steady-state photoconductance. In the case of the sample which was passivated using p-type amorphous silicon(a-Si:H), the minority carrier lifetime was 8.9μs. When the passivation layer was intrinsic a-Si:H, the minority carrier lifetime was 221.3μs. Considering the minority carrier lifetimes of both samples, silicon heterojunction solar cells were fabricated with and without intrinsic a-Si:H layer. the efficiency of the sample passivated with intrinsic amorphous silicon was 13.52%, whereas it was only 11.58% when this layer was not employed.