Welcome to the 3rd edition of the NextBase project newsletter.
The NextBase project has entered its 18th month. We had a successful fourth general assembly (GA) meeting at JÜLICH in Jülich/Aachen in February 2018. The project is currently proceeding according to schedule. High quality standards on c-Si wafers have been confirmed by achieving 2 ms/Ohm.cm as lifetime over resistivity ratio and textured wafers with lifetime above 3 ms. IBC-SHJ solar cells were processed using several patterning techniques: photolithography, laser-based patterning and shadow-masks. All these techniques have been demonstrating regular progress since the NextBase project kick-off. As of March 2018, shadow-mask-based IBC-SHJ devices demonstrated up to 24.1 % efficiency, photolithography-based ones up to 23.3 %, and laser-based ones up to 22.5 %. Cost model for IBC-SHJ devices has been built based on well-known standard SHJ technologies. First economic assessment for IBC specific configuration is found to be very promising. An optimization path to build IBC-SHJ solar cells with efficiency > 26.0% has been established using device simulation.
In the last one and a half years, we have been working on various approaches to evaluate the most promising path towards reaching the targets in the objectives. Now we are entering the consolidation phase to narrow down the technological varieties and to join force in the next one and a half years. So far, the NextBase project has fulfilled its expectation of being a valuable platform for IBC-SHJ technology development in European. A sincere thanks to all partners and especially to the work package leaders for the successful collaboration so far.