Improvement of metal-semiconductor contact on silicon micro-structured surface by electroless nickel technique

摘要

Si micro-structures served as anti-reflection layer are widely employed in Si-based solar cells and detectors to enhance light harvesting. However, performance of these devices is suffered from the poor contact between the metal electrode and micro-structured surface. Conventional vacuum deposited metal electrode makes only superficial contact with the top of micro-structured surface and unable to fill the holes in the micro-structures. In this paper, instead, electroless nickel technique is applied to form low resistance ohmic contact. The surface micro-structures were fabricated by electrochemistry etching while the metal electrodes were deposited by sputtering and electroless pasting. Results show that only electroless nickel layer could fully fill the holes and achieve better ohmic contact than the sputtering ones before rapid annealing. Furthermore, a higher temperature rapid annealing process could improve the contact of all samples prepared by different ways. The specific contact resistance achieved by high alkalinity (pH=12) electroless nickel is 1.34×10~(-1)Ω·cm~2.