Towards high‐eficiency silicon solar cells by rapid thermal processing

Rapid thermal processing can offer many advantages, such as small overall thermal budget and low power and time consumption, in a strategy focused on cost‐effective techniques for the preparation of solar cells in a continuous way. We show here that this very short duration (a few tens of seconds) of isothermal heating performed in a lamp furnace can be used for many thermal steps of silicon solar cell processing. Rapid thermal processing was applied to form the p‐n junction from a phosphorus‐doped spin‐on silica film deposted on (100) silicon substrates at typical processing temperatures between 800 and 1100°C. the solar cells showed conversion efficiencies as good as those processed in a conventional way.