Defect-band emission photoluminescence imaging on multi-crystalline Si solar cells

Defect-band photoluminescence (PL) imaging with an InGaAs camera was applied to multicrystalline silicon (mc-Si) wafers, which were taken from different heights of different Si bricks. Neighboring wafers were picked at six different processing steps, from as-cut to post-metallization. By using different cut-off filters, we were able to separate the band-to-band emission images from the defect-band emission images. On the defect-band emission images, the bright regions that originate from the grain boundaries and defect clusters were extracted from the PL images. The area fraction percentage of these regions at various processing stages shows a correlation with the final cell electrical parameters.