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Grown-in micro defects and photovoltaic characteristics of B and heavily Ge codoped CZ-Si

Mukannan Arivanandhan 1Raira Gotoh 2Fujiwara Kozo 2Satoshi Uda 2Yasuhiro Hayakawa 1Makoto Konagai 3

1. Research Institute of Electronics, Shizuoka University, Johoku 3-5-1, Naka-Ku,, Hamamatsu 432-8011, Japan
2. Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University, 2-1-1, Katahira, Aoba-ku, Sendai 980-8577, Japan
3. Department of Physical Electronics, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Okayama, Meguro-ku,, Tokyo 152 8552, Japan

Abstract

The quality of a Si crystal determines the cost and efficiency of a solar cell. It was found that Ge doping into Si is beneficial as it improves the quality of Si by controlling the void defects which improves the photovoltaic characteristics of B-doped CZ-Si [1]. However, Ge is obviously larger than Si and thus the addition of Ge should increase the lattice strain as the lattice mismatch between Si and Ge is about 4 %. Therefore, to explore the maximum range of Ge concentration which is beneficial for preparing high quality of Si, B and Ge codoped CZ-Si crystals with high Ge concentrations were grown and their defect and photovoltaic characteristics were studied. The experimental results show that the minority carrier lifetime (MCL) increased when the initial Ge concentration in Si melt (ClGe) increases up to 3×1020 cm-3 and decreased drastically when the ClGe increased beyond 3×1020 cm-3. The etching analysis revealed that the Secco etch pit defect (SEPD) density and flow pattern defect (FPD) density decreased up to ClGe of 3×1020 cm-3 and increased when the ClGe increased beyond 3×1020 cm-3, which resulted low MCL in heavily Ge codoped CZ-Si. The intentional variation of growth rates (v) of heavily Ge codoped CZ-Si (to avoid the cellular growth) may be influenced on the change in type of GMDs from void defects (reveled as FPDs for the crystals grown with relatively high growth rate, 0.7 mm/min) to A/B type self interstitial defects (revealed as SEPDs in the crystals grown with relatively low growth rates, 0.4 to 0.15 mm/min). Furthermore, in the heavily Ge codoped CZ-Si, the influence of Ge concentration is relatively smaller than v of crystal on the formation of GMDs.

Reference:

1.      M.Arivanandhan et al., J. Appl. Phys. 111, 043707 (2012).

 

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Related papers

Presentation: Oral at 17th International Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy - ICCGE-17, Topical Session 5, by Mukannan Arivanandhan
See On-line Journal of 17th International Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy - ICCGE-17

Submitted: 2013-04-11 04:18
Revised:   2013-04-12 12:57