Fabrication and characterization of single crystal silicon microwires to be used in photovoltaic solar cell

As renewable energy source solar energy is promising electric energy production for future. More than 65 years, there is a huge R&D effort throughout the world to develop solar cells. Solar cells made of silicon, one of the most abundant material, with relatively low production cost and high efficiency leading the solar energy market with its 90% share. Moreover, there are many research have been observed for the nano and micro structured silicon photovoltaic solar cell. In this study, single crystal well-ordered silicon microwire production was accomplished by nanosphere lithography, plasma etching and metal assisted chemical etching. Those methods are easy, fast and cheap and also consistent with solar cell production technology. Langmuir-Blodgett technique was used at nanosphere lithography. This method was preferred to easily transfer mono layer microspheres to 3 inches silicon wafer within minutes with minimum defect. Thus, hexagonal package and mono layer ordered spheres were used as a shadow mask. Spheres were etched in plasma medium followed by thermal evaporation to obtain honeycomb patterned gold mesh thin film. After obtaining patterned gold thin film, metal assisted chemical etching process has been utilized to produce regular and constant diameter silicon microwires. Those microwires have been doped by furnace with out to form radial p-n junction solar cells. According to the measurement results, the yield was obtained 14%.