Minority Carrier Lifetime of n-type Mono-crystalline Silicon Produced by Continuous Czochralski Technology and its Effect on Hetero-junction Solar Cells

The efficient use of the ingot material and high productivity of the continuous Czochralski (CCz) technology can help reduce the cost of n-type wafers which is one of the obstacles to the adoption of high performance n-type solar cells. Previous work has shown that 800 kg of n-type mono-crystalline ingot produced by CCz technology from a single crucible can be used to fabricate nPERT and n-Pasha solar cells with uniform performance despite the change of the minority carrier lifetime (MCLT) from the first to the last ingot. In this work, additional ingot characterizations have been done and higher performing hetero-junction (HJT) cells which are more sensitive to MCLT have been fabricated and characterized using the CCz wafers. Equivalent cell performance from CCz ingot to ingot pulled from a single run and between CCz and Cz has been demonstrated.