2. Passivation of high-efficiency crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells

2.1 The challenge: constantly improving the conversion efficiency of photovoltaic cells

For c-Si cells, as for all other PV technologies, conversion efficiency is essentially limited by the quality of the absorber (which determines the lifetime of the charge carriers), resistive losses, the geometry of the electrical contacts and, finally, the recombination of charge carriers on the front and rear surfaces. The constant reduction in the thickness of silicon wafers means that surfaces play an increasingly important role. As a result, recombinations at the interfaces between a heavily doped semiconductor...