page_title: Polycrystalline silicon
section_title: Potential for use of polycrystalline silicon
hierarchical_section_title: Polycrystalline silicon / Potential for use of polycrystalline silicon
caption_attribution_description: English: A picture of grain boundaries for polysilicon. Each grain is crystalline over the width of the grain. The grain boundary separates the grains where the adjoining grain is at a different orientation than its neighbor. The grain boundary separates regions of different crystal structure thus serving as a center for recombination. 'd' here is a characteristic grain size, which should be maximized for maximum solar cell efficiency. Typical values of d are about 1 micron.
context_page_description: Polycrystalline silicon, or multicrystalline silicon, also called polysilicon or poly-Si, is a high purity, polycrystalline form of silicon, used as a raw material by the solar photovoltaic and electronics industry.
  Polysilicon is produced from metallurgical grade silicon by a chemical purification process, called the Siemens process. This process involves distillation of volatile silicon compounds, and their decomposition into silicon at high temperatures. An emerging, alternative process of refinement uses a fluidized bed reactor. The photovoltaic industry also produces upgraded metallurgical-grade silicon, using metallurgical instead of chemical purification processes. When produced for the electronics industry, polysilicon contains impurity levels of less than one part per billion, while polycrystalline solar grade silicon is generally less pure. A few companies from China, Germany, Japan, Korea and the United States, such as GCL-Poly, Wacker Chemie, OCI, and Hemlock Semiconductor, as well as the Norwegian headquartered REC, accounted for most of the worldwide production of about 230,000 tonnes in 2013.
context_section_description: Currently, polysilicon is commonly used for the conducting gate materials in semiconductor devices such as MOSFETs; however, it has potential for large-scale photovoltaic devices. The abundance, stability, and low toxicity of silicon, combined with the low cost of polysilicon relative to single crystals makes this variety of material attractive for photovoltaic production. Grain size has been shown to have an effect on the efficiency of polycrystalline solar cells. Solar cell efficiency increases with grain size. This effect is due to reduced recombination in the solar cell. Recombination, which is a limiting factor for current in a solar cell, occurs more prevalently at grain boundaries, see figure 1.
  The resistivity, mobility, and free-carrier concentration in monocrystalline silicon vary with doping concentration of the single crystal silicon. Whereas the doping of polycrystalline silicon does have an effect on the resistivity, mobility, and free-carrier concentration, these properties strongly depend on the polycrystalline grain size, which is a physical parameter that the material scientist can manipulate. Through the methods of crystallization to form polycrystalline silicon, an engineer can control the size of the polycrystalline grains which will vary the physical properties of the material.
caption: A picture of grain boundaries for polysilicon. Each grain is crystalline over the width of the grain. The grain boundary separates the grains where the adjoining grain is at a different orientation from its neighbor. The grain boundary separates regions of different crystal structure thus serving as a center for recombination. 'd' here is a characteristic grain size, which should be maximized for maximum solar cell efficiency. Typical values of d are about 1 micrometre.
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