Backside damage-gettering in cast polycrystalline silicon

The technique of backside-damage gettering improves the performance of short minority-carrier diffusion length, large-grain (grain diameter greater than 1 to 2 mm), cast polycrystalline silicon. On average, increases of nearly 20 percent in short-circuit current, 10 mV in open-circuit voltage, and 15 percent in peak-power were obtained by heat-treating 300 micron thick polycrystalline wafers at 1000 C in flowing nitrogen for 5 hours. Additional measurements of the bulk and space-charge recombination current components indicate that this improvement results from a significant increase in the minority-carrier diffusion length due to gettering of impurities from the bulk.