Patent ID: 8207013

Claim:
A method of fabricating a silicon nanowire (SiNW) solar cell device having an upgraded metallurgical grade (UMG) silicon (Si) substrate, the method comprising: obtaining a UMG Si plate as a substrate, the UMG Si plate having a purity lower than 99.999% (5N) and a thickness not thicker than 200 micrometers (μm); cleaning a surface of the UMG Si plate; placing the UMG Si plate into an electron-gun (e-gun) evaporation equipment to obtain a nickel (Ni) metal thin film covering the surface of the UMG Si plate; heating up the UMG Si plate covered with said Ni metal thin film in a reaction chamber of an atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition (APCVD) equipment to obtain a nickel-silicon (Ni—Si) liquid phase alloy with said Ni metal thin film and said UMG Si plate, forming said Ni—Si liquid phase alloy having teardrop-shaped drops, at least some of said teardrop-shaped drops of said Ni—Si liquid phase alloy being distributed on the surface of the UMG Si plate and each of the teardrop-shaped drops of said Ni—Si liquid phase alloy having a nanometer scale; obtaining disilane (Si 2 H 6 ) for a SiNW process with hydrogen (H 2 ) as a carrier gas and providing a doping gas to obtain a plurality of SiNWs on the surface of the UMG Si plate that has the at least some teardrop-shaped drops of said Ni—Si liquid phase alloy, each of the SiNWs being started from a respective teardrop-shaped drop of the Ni—Si liquid phase alloy; forming the SiNWs from the respective teardrop-shaped drops of the Ni—Si liquid phase alloy on the surface of the UMG Si plate, such that each SiNW has a length of at least 10 nanometers (nm); providing another doping gas to obtain a thin film on an outside surface of each of the SiNWs to obtain a positive-negative (P-N) junction; and sequentially, obtaining a transparent conductive electrode through a sputtering deposition process and then processing a screen printing to obtain a front contact of silver paste and a back contact of aluminum paste.