Industrial 6 inch multicrystalline silicon solar cells fabricated using reactive ion etching with efficiency exceeding 18%

To obtain a lower reflectance, we applied a maskless plasma texturing technique by reactive ion etching (RIE) to acid-textured multicrystalline silicon (mc-Si) wafer. RIE texturing produced a deep and narrow textured surface with an excellent low reflectance. Owing to plasma-induced damage, unless the RIE-textured surface is subjected to proper damage removal etching (DRE), it shows drops in open circuit voltage (V _oc) and fill factor (FF). RIE-textured samples with proper DRE showed sufficiently higher short circuit current (I _sc) than acid-textured samples without a drop in V _oc. In this study, we applied RIE texturing under optimized DRE condition to the selective emitter structure. In comparison with the acidtextured solar cells, RIE-textured solar cells have absolute gains in I _sc above 200 mA. We successfully fabricated a 6-in. mc-Si solar cell with a conversion efficiency exceeding 18% by applying selective emitter technology with RIE texturing.