Conductive Copper Paste for Crystalline Silicon Solar Cells

Abstract

In photovoltaic industries, the main technique of metallization is screen printing with silver pastes due to its simple and quick process. However, the expensive price of silver paste is one of the barriers to the production of low-cost solar cells. Therefore, the most focused target in photovoltaic research is the decreasing consumption of silver paste or substitute silver for other materials. As a proper candidate, copper has been researched by many institutes and companies since it has a similar conductivity with silver even though the price is inexpensive. To apply copper as a contact for solar cells, the plating technique has been actively researched. However, copper paste, which was mainly developed for integrated circuit applications, has been recently researched. Mostly, copper paste was developed for the low-temperature annealing process since copper tends to oxidize easily. On the other hand, firing type copper paste was also developed by coating copper particles with a barrier layer. This chapter discusses recent development of copper paste for the application of solar cells and its appropriate annealing conditions for better electrical properties. Also, the light I-V characteristics of copper paste on the solar cells in other research papers are summarized as well.