German PV technology company Heraeus Photovoltaics has entered into a joint development partnership with Cell Engineering, another German engineering company, to develop metallization pastes for Laser Enhanced Contact Optimization (LECO) solutions and bring these to the market.
Heraeus said this solution would help solar cell makers to significantly improve their high-efficiency cell bin yields. Now, with Cell Engineering it expects overall cell efficiency to increase by up to 0.15% absolute.
It claims LECO brings down metal-induced recombination while maintaining low contact resistance increasing cell efficiency with a minimal impact to the production line and without the need for any process change. Heraeus acquired a LECO tool under the partnership and invested the new metallization paste.
"Our collaboration and partnership with Cell Engineering has produced what we believe is a potential game-changer for solar cell metallization. It will enable 'perfect' metallization contacts and help customers get even greater performance from their solar cells," said Heraeus Photovoltaics President Martin Ackermann.
Having developed LECO-specific metallization pastes to be used for difference cell types such as P-type ultra-low doped homogenous PERC, selective emitter (SE) PERC, N-type PERT and TOPCon, Heraeus will showcase a presentation at the EU PVSEC 2019 on September 12, 2019.