Investigation of Crystalline Silicon Surface Treatments in Amorphous – Crystalline Heterojunction Via Capacitance Measurements

ABSTRACTIn this work we investigate the density of states at amorphous-crystalline silicon interface that play the key role in the heterostructure solar cell application. In particular we analyzed the defect density arising from plasma treatment of the crystalline surface. This process is useful to clean the crystalline surface, but greatly influenced the electrical properties of the device. We used low temperature (20K-300K) capacitance measurement performed in a wide range of frequency of signal probe (1Hz-10kHz). Differences in the capacitance profile between samples with various plasma dry treatments indicate different defect density profile at interface. With the aid of a finite difference model of the capacitance as a function of temperature and frequency we extract information from the measurements about the defect energy distribution at interface. As a result, the density and the nature of defects at interface will be correlated to the technological parameters as: wafer cleaning procedure, hydrogen plasma treatment, type and concentration of dopants at interface.