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Copper–Nickel Alloy Plating to Improve the Contact Resistivity of Metal Grid on Silicon Heterojunction Solar Cells

  • Original Article - Electronics, Magnetics and Photonics
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Abstract

As a dominant metallization technique of crystalline silicon solar cells, screen printing with silver paste has been generally used in photovoltaic industries. In case of the silicon heterojunction solar cells (SHJ) structure, a metal contact with silver paste has lower electrical conductivity than pure silver due to the other compositions of the paste. For the reason, copper plating is attractive substitute for the silver paste since the plated-copper contacts have high conductivity and easily reduce line width which is beneficial to light absorption. In this experiment, we studied copper–nickel (Cu–Ni) alloy plating to form a seed layer of the copper plating on an indium tin oxide (ITO) layer which is used for the transparent conductive oxide of the SHJ solar cells. As a requirement of suitable seed layer, contact resistivity (ρc) between the seed and the ITO is important to obtain high fill factor by decreasing series resistance of solar cells. Contact resistivity values of the samples with varied nickel contents in the Cu–Ni films were extracted by using transfer length method. Also, the composition ratio of the alloy layer was analyzed by energy dispersive spectrometer. Moreover, X-ray diffraction was used to compare lattice parameter and crystallite size of the film.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) and the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy (MOTIE) of the Republic of Korea (No. 20173010012940) and by the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy, Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology (KEIT) (No. 10043793).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics Engineering, Green Strategic Energy Research Institute, Sejong University, Gwangjin-Gu, Seoul, 05006, Korea

    Sang Hee Lee, Doo Won Lee & Jeong Kim

  2. Jusung Engineering, Gwangju-Si, Gyeongggi-do, 12773, Korea

    Kyoung-jin Lim & Won-suk Shin

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  1. Sang Hee Lee
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Correspondence to Jeong Kim.

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Lee, S.H., Lee, D.W., Lim, Kj. et al. Copper–Nickel Alloy Plating to Improve the Contact Resistivity of Metal Grid on Silicon Heterojunction Solar Cells. Electron. Mater. Lett. 15, 314–322 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13391-019-00134-x

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