NREL is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy 

Efficiency & Renewable Energy, operated by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.

Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308

The Self Aligned Cell: 

Scaling Up Manufacture of a

Cost Effective Cell Architecture 

for Multicrystalline Silicon 

Photovoltaics

Phase I: 01/30/09 — 12/31/09

Phase II: 01/20/10 — 10/19/10

A. Gabor and F. van Mierlo

1366 Technologies, Inc. 

Lexington, Massachusetts

Subcontract Report

NREL/SR-5200-49934

December 2010
NREL is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy 

Efficiency & Renewable Energy, operated by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory

1617 Cole Boulevard

Golden, Colorado 80401

303-275-3000 • www.nrel.gov

Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308

The Self Aligned Cell: 

Scaling Up Manufacture of a

Cost Effective Cell Architecture 

for Multicrystalline Silicon 

Photovoltaics

Phase I: 01/30/09 — 12/31/09

Phase II: 01/20/10 — 10/19/10

A. Gabor and F. van Mierlo

1366 Technologies, Inc. 

Lexington, Massachusetts

NREL Technical Monitor: Bolko von Roedern

Prepared under Subcontract No. NAT-9-88012-01

Subcontract Report

NREL/SR-5200-49934

December 2010
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1

Table of Contents

Executive Summary.....................................................................................................................................2

Task Descriptions........................................................................................................................................3

Patterning Task ..........................................................................................................................3

Metallization Task .....................................................................................................................6

Cell Integration Task..................................................................................................................9

Manufacturing Task.................................................................................................................14
2

Executive Summary

Over the course of this subcontract, 1366 Technologies has evolved from a young, unknown startup 

company with promising technology to a well respected company with successful commercialization of 

work performed under the subcontract. We have both booked profitable orders and signed key 

partnerships. We are on the way to having a major impact on the PV industry, and the government 

support under this subcontract was critical in making this happen.

The goal of the contract was to develop two areas of technology for fabrication of higher efficiency Siwafer solar cells: The first area is the formation of structured texturing that is an improvement over the 

industry-standard isotexture process that is applied to multicrystalline wafers. Such a surface has the 

benefits of 1) Lower reflectivity, 2) Decoupling the performance of the texture from the saw damage, 

thus allowing for better advances in sawing and a more robust wet process, and 3) Equal performance 

with lower-cost kerf-free wafers such as 1366 Direct Wafers that have no good existing texturing 

solution due to their lack of the saw damage required for isotexturing. The second area is the formation 

of fine line (<50 micron) metallization seed layers in a self-aligned manner where the fingers can be 

automatically and perfectly lined up to a selective emitter and where expensive silver screen printing 

paste can be mostly replaced by plating up the seed layers with silver or copper.

The SETP goals of lower $/W manufacture of solar cells is supported by this program in the following 

ways:

• Both the texturing and metallization technologies increase cell efficiency with little or no 

increase in manufacturing cost/wafer

• The texturing process is enabling for next generation kerf-free wafers. This enables a large 

reduction in $/W for wafer production.

• The use of metallization seed layers enables the use of cheaper copper plating. This is 

essential for Terrawatt production due to limitations of silver supply.

Under the contract, 1366 Technologies developed 2 pilot machines for 1) deposition and patterning of 

low-cost resist layers to enable simultaneous Honeycomb front texturing and groove formation for 

multicrystalline Si wafers, and 2) fine-line dispensing of materials that are self aligned to the grooves 

(e.g. – P dopant material for selective emitter formation, and Ag ink for finger seed layers to be later 

plated up). Multicrystalline cells with 1366-Texture and standard screen printed metallization showed 

efficiency improvements as high as 0.4% absolute in comparison to isotextured control cells, and 

encapsulated multicrystalline cells using both 1366-Texture and 1366-Metallization achieved NREL 

verified efficiencies close to 18%.

In terms of commercialization, a contract has been signed with a large cell manufacturer for converting 

their factories to 1366-Texture, and a partnering agreement has been reached with the largest in-line wet 

processing equipment company in the PV industry. This company, RENA GmbH, is customizing their 

wet benches to perform the etching part of the process, and the combination of the 1366-Patterning

Machine, the RENA wetbench, and the RENA loading/unloading equipment will be marketed and sold 

as a cluster solution. The marketing of the texturing equipment began during the 5th World Photovoltaic 

Energy Conference and Exhibition in Valencia, Spain during September of 2010, and 1366 was 
3

recognized with an oral presentation during the conference on both the texturing and metallization 

technologies. 

Task Descriptions

Work under the contract was divided into the following tasks:

• Patterning

•

– Developing the process, materials, pattern design and equipment to pattern a low 

cost resist. Developing the etching chemistry and process to etch through the patterned resist 

to form the light trapping surface texture and grooves for self-aligned metallization on 

multicrystalline wafers.

Metallization

•

– Developing the process, materials, and equipment to form seed layers within 

grooves that are suitable for plating up with silver or copper for formation of narrow fingers. 

Cell integration

•

– Integrating the advanced texture and self-aligned fine-line metallization to 

make high-efficiency multicrystalline solar cells. Develop a process for selective emitter 

formation such that the metallization and highly doped grooves are self-aligned to each other.

Scaleup

The sections below detail each of these tasks.

- Build pilot line equipment for patterning and metallization leading to commercial 

production.

Patterning Task

Work under this task consisted of 1) Developing an apparatus to pattern a low-cost mask layer into an 

array of hole or line openings for texture, and line openings for fingers; 2) Developing specialized 

chemistries for etching silicon through these mask openings to create the texture and metallization 

grooves. A v-groove texture was formed by etching through an array of line openings, while a 

honeycomb texture was formed by etching through a hexagonal array of point openings. A downselect 

was performed early on to concentrate on the lower reflectivity honeycomb approach. Honeycomb 

texture is the most promising surface for multicrystalline wafers but solutions to implement this have 

been complicated and expensive. The foremost industrial method pursued to date has been developed 

by Mitsubishi and has been utilized in their record efficiency multicrystalline cells. However the 

apparent process flow, as is shown below, involves multiple wetbenches, an expensive vacuum 

deposition step and intensive laser processing to produce many millions of holes per wafer in the SiN 

etchmask. Contrast this to the much simpler method being pursued by 1366.
4

Examples of our resulting surface structure for honeycomb texture and for honeycomb texture with 

finger grooves is shown in the SEM images below. The processes and equipment were optimized to 

meet our goals of reflectivity, tolerance to surface defects in the wafers, cosmetic uniformity, cost, 

scalability, and throughput. We have demonstrated reflectivities superior to the industry standard 

isotexture on a wide range of multicrystalline and kerf-free wafer substrates. In contrast to many other 

methods of texturing, the improved reflectivity was achieved with a loss in open circuit voltage. 

Grooves < 30 microns in width were also demonstrated with this technology. 

In contrast to isochemical texturing (isotexture) which requires saw damage to help nucleate the texture, 

1366-Texture is compatible with kerfless wafers such as ribbons or cleaved slices which have no saw 

damage. This technique uses a single etch chemistry for different wafer surfaces and crystallographic 

orientations. Since the acid compositions used are different from those used for isotexture, the nature of 

how the etchant interacts with grain boundaries and dislocations is also different. The “rift” structures 

seen in the isotexture image below are not seen within 1366-Texture. This absence of deep etching at 

the dislocations may help cell performance and reduce the tendency for hot spot heating in modules. It 

has been shown that multicrystalline wafers of different qualities and dislocation densities have different 

optimal etching times for isotexturing in terms of maximizing efficiency. With 1366-Texture we can 

expect a more uniform texturing as a function of wafer quality and possibly a tighter distribution of cell 

performance. In the honeycomb image below a barely observable grain boundary is present where the 

pits have a slightly different shape on the two grains. Improvements in the uniformity of the reflectance 

will be achieved in the future by modifying the etchant to attain more isotropic etching. In addition, the 

process allows for an optional polished rear side with no added complexity. This gives the wafers 

compatibility with advanced cell structures using rear dielectric passivation that would otherwise require 

a second polishing step. Thus we can accomplish up to three goals with the addition of just one 
5

machine: 1) advanced texture, 2) finger grooves for advanced front metallization, and 3) rear polishing 

for advanced back structures.

 

The graph below shows an example of the lower reflectivity of nitrided wafers with 1366-Texture as 

compared to isotexture. This would correspond to an absolute efficiency increase of 0.27%. The 

development of the equipment, processes, and materials is still ongoing, and we have programs in place 

to further improve the texture. These improvements will close the gap between 1366-Texture and 

random pyramid texture, which could lead to an efficiency gain of 0.8%. Comparison experiments with 

isotextured cells to date have shown efficiency benefits as high as 0.4% absolute.
6

Wafer strength appears to be excellent following texturing as is shown by the 4pt bending tests below 

for wafers subjected to both compressive and tensile stress on the textured side, although statistical 

comparisons need to be performed. Anecdotally, wafers appear to be stronger than isotextured control 

wafers.

Metallization Task

Conventional screen printed front fingers have two main problems: 1) the cost of the silver paste, and 2) 

the width of the fingers. The silver paste is already the second highest materials cost in making a solar 

cell (after the wafer), and as PV production levels climb toward the Terrawatt level, the limited 

availability of silver would cause silver prices to climb further. Plated silver has better bulk 

conductivity than sintered silver paste which can help reduce silver consumption to some degree, but 

eventually most of the silver needs to be replaced by plated copper which is much more abundant and 
7

lower in cost. We have taken the approach of developing seed layer dispensing technology that allows 

for very fine finger formation for higher cell efficiencies, and which is compatible with plating to 

deposit the bulk of metal.

We have focused on two main areas within this task: 1) Development of a deposition system that 

deposits metal ink seed layers into grooves in the wafer surface in a self-aligned manner, and 2) 

Optimization of ink formulation to achieve our goals in terms of finger width, contact resistivity, 

adhesion strength, finger continuity, deposition reliability, and deposition rate. 

After much internal work and consultation with potential customers, a downselect was made during 

Phase1 of the contract to focus on deposition of inks that are modified versions of standard fritted firethrough silver pastes. After a standard co-fire process, the seed layers are plated up with Ag or Ni-CuSn stacks. This approach was seen to have the most near term industrial acceptance as well as the best 

near term reliability and performance. However, the deposition system was developed to be compatible 

with future technology nodes involving all-plated contacts.

Narrower fingers are a clear requirement for improved metallization performance, and a reduction in the 

use of Ag paste will also help reduce materials costs. The formation of finger grooves has some 

advantages over finger formation on a flat surface. Metallizing within grooves can increase finger 

adhesion strength and limit the amount of lateral finger growth during plating to minimize shading. The 

image below demonstrates the closer finger spacing that can be achieved with our fine line metallization 

in contrast to screen printing. Fingers are placed closer together for reduced resistive losses in the 

emitter, further allowing lower emitter doping for improved blue response, while also reducing finger 

shading.

With our high-speed, self-aligned 1366-Dispensing system, we have achieved seed layer fingers with 

widths below 30 microns and with fired thicknesses below 2 microns as is seen below. Upon co-firing 

1.11 mm
8

of the front and rear metallization pastes, the front Ag fires through the SiNx. Due to the lack of sharp 

features in the grooves, shunt resistances are high, even on shallow emitters. 

Following light induced plating, the finger heights are usually 6-9 microns as is seen in cross-section 

SEM micrographs of samples below. 

A top view optical micrograph of a finger is shown below as is an electroluminescence image of a 

finished cell which shows no significant finger discontinuities. We have seen that the narrowest plated 

fingers, fully contained within the grooves, can be obtained by dispensing paste only on the bottom 

region of the grooves. For better contact resistance and adhesion, paste is more commonly deposited to 

cover the full surface of the groove. In this case, the fingers grow in width outside the grooves during 

plating. Contact resistivities are typically below 2 milliohm-cm

2 for uniform sheet resistivities of 90 

ohms/sq. Selective emitters may not be necessary for structures with the plated-up seed layer approach 

based on these results. However, the selective emitter approach will likely be valuable for an all-plated 

approach to widen the process window.

24 μm
9

 

Although the primary application used to date for the 1366-Dispensing system has been for deposition 

of silver ink into grooves, the system is a general purpose tool capable of dispensing a wide range of 

materials. The self-aligned nature of this system allows for the automatic alignment of one processing 

step to a subsequent step – a powerful manufacturing concept. As is discussed in the section below, we 

demonstrated this concept by self-aligning a selective emitter pattern to the metallization pattern. We 

have also explored other applications and expect more to evolve.

Cell Integration Task

The 1366-Texture described above can be either combined with 1366-Dispensing or stand on its own 

and be combined with conventional screen printing for front contact formation. The flowcharts below 

describe the planned industrial approach for these two cases. RENA wet processing equipment will 

described in the next section. For the development work under this contract, nearly all etching and 

plating was performed in batch mode at 1366. Proof of concept in-line etching and plating was 

demonstrated to reduce scale-up risk.
10

An image of a typical cell is shown below. Since encapsulated cell efficiencies are the most relevant 

and since the light trapping from the honeycomb texture is dependent on the encapsulation, reflectivity 

measurements were often made with index matching oil to take into account encapsulation effects, and 

encapsulated cell coupons were regularly made to gauge our progress. An image of an encapsulated cell 

is shown below. 

Dispensing of a phosphorus-containing dopant into the grooves prior to POCl3 diffusion allows the 

formation of a selective emitter profile with deep diffusion in the grooves. The selective emitter profile 

promotes good contact resistance and low shunting, while retaining a shallow diffusion in the field 
11

between grooves for an improved blue response. The plot below shows a SIMS depth profile of the P 

concentration in two portions of a bare wafer following diffusion and glass etch: a region in the center of 

a groove and a region in the field between two grooves. The peak P concentration and the depth of the 

diffusion are much heavier in the groove. Also below is a SIMS line scan of surface P concentration, 

where the concentration in the groove is twice as high as immediately outside the groove. This 

demonstrates that narrow bands of heavy diffusion can be achieved by this technique.

Such a narrow diffused band is useless for conventional methods of metallization, as aligning metal 

fingers directly on heavily diffused regions has proved to be a challenge. In practice, manufacturers 

make heavily diffused bands that are significantly wider than the fingers to allow for the tolerances in 

alignment and process variations. Having a heavily diffused region extend significantly beyond the 

fingers greatly reduces the blue response of the device in these regions, giving back some of the 

potential gains of the selective emitter structure. In contrast the self-aligning characteristic of the 1366-
12

Dispensing method allows for perfect alignment of the dopant and metal seed layer within the grooves, 

and thus of the fingers to the highly diffused regions. The process is also elegantly simple, requiring 

only the addition of one gentle dispensing step and a modification to the diffusion recipe. This is in 

contrast to other methods of selective emitter formation that require the addition of several expensive 

steps. The process flow for our selective emitter process is shown below.

Our champion multicrystalline encapsulated cell I-V measurement, confirmed by NREL, is shown 

below with an efficiency close to 18%. This cell had a conventional back Al paste metallization. With 

improvements to the aspect ratios and uniformity of the pits in the honeycomb structure, our champion 

result will exceed 18% efficiency in the near future. This cell utilized a uniformly doped emitter with a 

sheet resistance of around 90 ohms/sq. Due to our ability to contact such low doped emitters, the 

potential benefits of the selective emitter structures are modest. However, implementation of the 

selective emitters may broaden industrial process widows and may also be particularly beneficial in 

combination with future all-plated metallization structures. 
13

The graphs below demonstrate that for encapsulated cells (standard interconnect wire, EVA encapsulant, 

and 3mm Centrosol C+glass) under standard testing conditions the change in short circuit current after 

encapsulation is better for 1366-Texture, as is the performance vs. tilt angle from the sun outdoors for 

the encapsulated cells. While cell performance under standard testing conditions is certainly important, 

in the end, the energy delivery under real world conditions is what matters most. This preliminary data 

suggests that modules with 1366-Texture will perform well in the field.
14

Manufacturing Task

To commercialize the 1366-Patterning and 1366-Dispensing systems, complementary downstream 

processing equipment is needed. For 1366-Patterning, a customized in-line wetbench is needed, and for 

1366-Dispensing, plating equipment is needed to plate up the seed layer. To this end, we have teamed 

with the world leader in wet processing equipment for silicon wafer PV. RENA GmbH is our ideal 

partner, and is working to optimize the etching materials, process, and equipment for implement of 

1366-Texture. They have recently constructed pilot line wetbenches for etching optimization. Working 

with such a powerful partner will maximize our speed to market. Also, support from the market leader 

in the present dominant texturing technology is a strong vote of confidence for our next generation 

texturing solution. The combination of the 1366-Patterning Machine, the RENA wetbench, and the 

RENA loading/unloading equipment will be marketed and sold as a cluster solution. The marketing of 

the texturing equipment began during the 5th World Photovoltaic Energy Conference and Exhibition in 

Valencia, Spain during September of 2010, and 1366 was recognized with an oral presentation during 

the conference on both the texturing and metallization technologies. 

Below is a page from a data sheet for the 1366-Patterning production system. While pilot systems were 

built and demonstrated at 3MW rates for both 1366-Patterning and 1366-Dispensing, the patterning 

system is further along and is the first machine to be commercialized. The first contract has recently 

been signed with a large cell manufacturer for converting their factories to 1366-Texture. This first 

commercialization constitutes a successful close to the subcontract.
15
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December 2010

2. REPORT TYPE

Subcontract final report

3. DATES COVERED (From - To)

Phase I: 01/30/09 — 12/31/09

Phase II: 01/20/10 — 10/19/10

4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE

The Self Aligned Cell: Scaling Up Manufacture of a Cost Effective 

Cell Architecture for Multicrystalline Silicon Photovoltaics

5a. CONTRACT NUMBER

DE-AC36-08-GO28308

5b. GRANT NUMBER

5c. PROGRAM ELEMENT NUMBER

6. AUTHOR(S)

A. Gabor and F. van Mierlo

5d. PROJECT NUMBER

NREL/SR-5200-49934

5e. TASK NUMBER

PV10.1199

5f. WORK UNIT NUMBER

7. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES)

1366 Technologies, Inc.

45 Hartwell Avenue

North Lexington, MA 02421

8. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION

REPORT NUMBER

NAT-9-88012-01

9. SPONSORING/MONITORING AGENCY NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES)

National Renewable Energy Laboratory

1617 Cole Blvd.

Golden, CO 80401-3393

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NREL

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NREL/SR-5200-49934

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National Technical Information Service

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13. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES

NREL Technical Monitor: Bolko von Roedern

14. ABSTRACT (Maximum 200 Words)

Two areas of technology for fabrication of higher efficiency Si-wafer solar cells were addressed: (1) the formation of 

structured texturing that is an improvement over the industry-standard isotexture process for multicrystalline wafers. 

(2) the formation of fine line (<50 micron) metallization seed layers in a self-aligned manner where the fingers can be 

automatically and perfectly lined up to a selective emitter and where expensive silver screen printing paste can be 

mostly replaced by plating up the seed layers with silver or copper. The benefits are: a) Lower reflectivity , b) 

Decoupling the performance of the texture from the saw damage, thus allowing for better advances in sawing and a 

more robust wet process. 1366 Technologies developed 2 pilot machines for 1) deposition and patterning of low-cost 

resist layers to enable simultaneous Honeycomb front texturing and groove formation for multicrystalline Si wafers, 

and 2) fine-line dispensing of materials that are self aligned to the grooves. 

15. SUBJECT TERMS

Multicrystalline Silicon solar cells; texturing of multicrystalline silicon solar cells; honeycomb texture; selective emitter 

silicon solar cell; self-aligned solar cell; solar cell manufacturing equipment

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