The etching process can be physical and/or chemical, wet or dry, and isotropic or anisotropic. All these etch process variations can be used during solar cell processing. Figure 1: Etching processes divided according to their physical, chemical, or combined (physical and chemical) nature.
Solar cells require surface texturing in order to reduce light reflectance, and to enhance light trapping. Anisotropic wet chemical etching is commonly used to form pyramids on the (1 0 1 1. Introduction
Orientation-selective etching can easily obtain microstructures with a high aspect ratio via micro-mask assistant. 21 However, RIE is hard to meet the needs of large-scale solar cell texturing due to the vacuum environment and cost constraints.
Pyramidal-like surface textures can be achieved by plasma etching, mechanical engraving, and chemical etching. Due to cost efficiency, anisotropic wet chemical etching of (1 0 0) silicon using alkaline solutions such as NaOH, KOH, and TMAH aqueous solutions are broadly accepted as a commercial standard method , .
In order to obtain the microstructure with the ideal feature and size for silicon solar cell texturing, it is necessary to further study the anisotropic removal behavior of the Si surface etched by low-temperature atmospheric plasma and clarify the topography formation mechanism.
The insight into anisotropic etching behavior and topography formation mechanism of the silicon surface textured by atmospheric plasma is valuable for developing a new texturing approach to silicon solar cells.
In this study, we employed two different chemical etching processes to recover Si wafers from degraded Si solar cells. Each etching process consisted of two steps: (1) first etching carried out using a nitric acid (HNO 3) and hydrofluoric acid …