The key role of water to obtain high-mobility IO:H (hydrogenated indium oxide) layers has been well documented, but introducing the required tiny amount of water is technologically challenging. We first use simulations to evidence the key role of high mobility for the transparent conductive oxide for high-efficiency crystalline silicon solar cells. Then, we investigate an approach to fabricate high-mobility IO:H that circumvent the introduction of water vapor, relying on water vapor from ambient air. A sputtering tool equipped with a residual gas analyzer allows partial pressure monitoring of hydrogen and water in the system, and to link the gas composition to the properties of the deposited films. To vary the residual water pressure, we varied the pumping time after opening the chamber and before starting the deposition to reach different base pressures (1. 10^-5 mbar to 3. 10^-7 mbar), which are mostly composed of residual water. An optimum base pressure around 3. 10^-6 mbar - and not lower pressures - was found to yield the highest mobility values after annealing. An alternative approach by introducing a small flow of hydrogen together with argon and oxygen is also shown to provide promising results.

The dehydrogenation of intrinsic hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) at temperatures above approximately 300 °C degrades its ability to passivate silicon wafer surfaces. This limits the temperature of post-passivation processing steps during the fabrication of advanced silicon heterojunction or silicon-based tandem solar cells. We demonstrate that a hydrogen plasma can rehydrogenate intrinsic a-Si:H passivation layers that have been dehydrogenated by annealing. The hydrogen plasma treatment fully restores the effective carrier lifetime to several milliseconds in textured crystalline silicon wafers coated with 8-nm-thick intrinsic a-Si:H layers after annealing at temperatures of up to 450 °C. Plasma-initiated rehydrogenation also translates to complete solar cells: A silicon heterojunction solar cell subjected to annealing at 450 °C (following intrinsic a-Si:H deposition) had an open-circuit voltage of less than 600 mV, but an identical cell that received hydrogen plasma treatment reached a voltage of over 710 mV and an efficiency of over 19%.