Inkjet technology for crystalline silicon photovoltaics

The world's ever increasing demand for energy necessitates technologies that generate electricity from inexhaustible and easily accessible energy sources. Silicon photovoltaics is a technology that can harvest the energy of sunlight. Its great characteristics have fueled research and development activities in this exciting field for many years now. One of the most important activities in the solar cell community is the investigation of alternative fabrication and structuring technologies, ideally serving both of the two main goals: device optimization and reduction of fabrication costs. Inkjet technology is practically evaluated along the whole process chain. Research activities cover many processes, such as surface texturing, emitter formation, or metallization. Furthermore, the inkjet technology itself is manifold as well. It can be used to apply inks that serve as a functional structure, present in the final device, as mask for subsequent structuring steps, or even serve as a reactant source to activate chemical etch reactions. This article reviews investigations of inkjet-printing in the field of silicon photovoltaics. The focus is on the different inkjet processes for individual fabrication steps of a solar cell. A technological overview and suggestions about where future work will be focused on are also provided. The great variety of the investigated processes highlights the ability of the inkjet technology to find its way into many other areas of functional printing and printed electronics.