Abstract
In this study, different designs of contact schemes for back contact silicon heterojunction (BC-SHJ) solar cells are simulated and optimized using numerical device simulation in 2D and 3D for both stripe and point contacts. Unlike in conventional BC cells, the emitter and BSF contacts in BC-SHJ are well passivated, which allows to maintain a high open circuit Voltage (V OC ) even if the contacts to cover the entire rear surface. The results show that BC-SHJ cells have the potential to reach efficiencies above 25% without using sophisticated patterning methods such as photolithography (PL) for the rear side contact patterning. Therefore current techniques for silicon solar cell fabrication such as screen-printing (SP) are sufficient to meet the requirements for BC-SHJ cell fabrication which shows a great potential to further reduce the production cost of high efficiency silicon solar cells. © 2013 The Authors.