Despite the increasing trend of n-type silicon wafer utilization in the manufacturing of high-efficiency heterojunction solar cells due to the superior advantages over p-type counterparts, its high manufacturing cost remains to be one of the most crucial factors, which impedes its market share growth with state-of-the-art silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells demonstrating high conversion efficiencies from various configurations, the prospect of using an n-type wafer is debatable from a cost-efficiency point of view. Hence, a systematic comparison between p- and n-type SHJ solar cells was executed in this work using AFORS-HET numerical software. Front and rear-emitter architectures were selected for each type of wafer with ideal (without defects) and non-ideal (with defects) conditions. For ideal conditions, solar cells with p-type wafers and a front-emitter structure resulted in a maximum conversion efficiency of 28%, while n-type wafers demonstrated a maximum efficiency of 26% from the rear-emitter structure. These high-performance devices were possible due to the optimization of the bandgap and electron-affinity for all passivating and doping layers with values ranging from 1.3 to 1.7 eV and 3.9 to 4 eV, respectively. The correlation between the device structure and the type of wafers as demonstrated here will be helpful for the development of both types of solar cells with comparable performance.
Keywords: AFORS-HET; crystalline silicon solar cells; heterojunction; n- and p-types wafers; rear and front-emitters; simulation.