The company said LID reduces the efficiency of modules in the field by up to 5% in the first few hours of exposure to the sun, thus significantly reducing the net energy harvest. Sixtron has demonstrated that solar cells with a Silexium antireflective passivation coating exhibit at least 88% less LID than solar cells with traditional silane-based SiNx coatings.
The optimized process flow and reference architecture was developed by Sixtron at their development laboratory in Montreal with resulting cells benchmarked by the University Center for Excellence in Photovoltaics (UCEP) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The precursor for Silexium films is delivered to industry standard plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) equipment by Sixtron’s SunBox silane-free gas generation system.
Sixtron claims that its Silexium process technology now provides manufacturers with a drop-in solution to the LID problem that enables maximum flexibility within their silicon wafer supply chain. This delivers further economic advantages to cell manufacturers over higher-priced LID reducing technologies.
Bates Marshall, vice president of sales and marketing at Sixtron, said: ”With the release of our Silexium process technology, Sixtron is addressing a major concern of cell and module manufacturers. Sixtron’s Silexium process provides solar cell manufacturers with the only simple, low-cost solution to improve the efficiency of their products while simultaneously reducing manufacturing costs by eliminating the pyrophoric hazards of silane.”
The company said that solar cells made with Silexium coatings also deliver shunt resistance and reduced reverse current by an order of magnitude, representing protections against cell degradation. Shunting, also known as leakage, occurs when small defects in solar cells create alternate pathways for the flow of electricity; reverse currents, caused by shading and low light, create hot spots that can permanently damage the cells.
