Canadian Solar Inc. has announced achieving 22.80% conversion efficiency for p-type large area multi-crystalline silicon solar cell, exceeding its own previous record of 22.28% previously reported earlier this year (see Trina & Canadian Solar Report Cell Efficiency Records).
Germany's Institute für Solarenergieforschung GmbH (ISFH) has tested and certified the P5 (casted mono) cell conversion efficiency from Canadian Solar. Casted mono (or quasi mono) is a crystallization technology that combines the equipment (large crucibles for large square ingots) used for multi-crystalline with mono crystallization (using crystal seeds to produce a a mono crystalline ingots).
The Chinese producer achieved the 22.80% efficiency level by fabricating a multi-crystalline cell using 157 mm x 157 mm (area 246.66 cm2) P5 silicon wafers and production ready technologies as Metal Catalyzed Chemical Etch (MCCE), black-silicon texturing, selective emitter, multi-layer anti-reflection coating, advanced surface passivation, and optimized grid design and metallization.
Canadian Solar that has switched all of its solar cell capacity to mainly multi-PERC as well as mono-PERC since August 2019, specifies using its own MCCE black-silicon texturing technology to further improve cell performance.