Electrical Behaviour of Thermally Diffused Silicon Solar Cells Submitted to Rapid Annealing

Conventional thermally diffused silicon solar cells have been submitted to subsequent rapid thermal annealing (1–10 s) in the temperature range 600–1000 °C, in order to investigate the effects of such treatments on the electrical behaviour. It appears that a decrease of the minority carrier diffusion length in the base region of the device is produced due to the generation of microscopic defects (as measured by DLTS) induced by the rapid high temperature cycling.