Wet etching of different thickness c-Si wafers for light trapping improvement

Surface texturing plays an important role to reduce light reflection and improve light confinement within silicon substrate thus resulting in solar cell efficiency enhancement. In this paper wet anisotropic texturing and subsequent wet isotropic smoothing of different thickness c-Si wafers are investigated to light trapping improvement. The influence of reagent concentration and etching time of the process smoothing are studied. The reflection properties of textured wafers, before and after smoothing steps, are monitored using UV-VIS spectrophotometer and the surface morphology images are acquired by scanning electron microscope. © 2014 AEIT.