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This paper deals with a novel structure of polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) solar cell for terrestrial applications. Grain boundary (GB) in poly-Si degrades a conversion efficiency of poly-Si solar cell. To reduce the GB side-effect, we investigated various parameters such as the preferential GB etch, etchtime, ITO electrode, heat treatment, and emitter layer effect. Among various preferential etchants such as Sirtl, Yang, Secco, and Schimmel, a Schimmel etchant illustrated an excellent preferential etching property. We observed a 10μm deep trench along grain boundaries and randomly textured grain surface with pyramid structure. We used rf magnetron sputter grown tin doped indium oxide (ITO) film as a top contact metal. ITO films showed a resistivity of 1.14 ×10-4 Ω-cm and transmittance of 90.5% for the wavelength of 594 nm. ITO films served as a top electrode as well as an effective AR coating layer. ITO film properties were strongly influenced by the preparation temperatures. Substrate temperature of 400oC gave the highest conversion efficiency of poly-Si solar cell. With well-fabricated poly-Si solar cells, we were able to achieve conversion efficiency as high as 16% at the input power of 20 mW/cm2.

The module technology proposed in this paper is used to fabricate a wire embedded ethyl vinyl acetate (EVA) sheet module by applying a cell/module integrated process in which the cell and wire are bonded during the lamination process. A wire-embedded EVA sheet module was fabricated using a busbarless cell and SnBiAg wire. As a result of the module characteristics corresponding to the lamination process temperature, the highest efficiency of 19.55% was observed at 170 °C. The lowest contact resistivity between the wire and the finger electrode was shown under a temperature condition of 170 °C, which was confirmed to increase the efficiency owing to an improvement of the fill factor with an excellent electrical contact.

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Ordered nanostructure materials have received attention due to their unique physical properties and potential applications in electronics, mechanics and optical devices. To actualize most of the proposed applications, it is quite important to obtain highly ordered nanostructure arrays. The well-aligned nanostructure can be achieved by synthesizing nanostructure material in the highly ordered template. In this paper, Anodic Aluminum Oxide (AAO) templates were fabricated using a two-step anodization process with pretreatment such as electropolishing and annealing. To reduce process time and get well-aligned pore array, rapid thermal anneal by an IR lamp was employed in vacuum state at 500oC for 2 hours. The pore array is comparable to a template annealed in vacuum furnace at 500oC for 30 hours. The well-fabricated AAO template has a mean pore diameter of 70 nm and the interpore distance of 100nm. The pore density can be as high as 1.2×1010cm-2.