Nickel-induced crystallization of amorphous silicon

The nickel-induced crystallization of hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) is used to obtain large grained polycrystalline silicon thin films on glass substrates. a-Si:H is deposited by plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition at 200 deg. C, preparing intrinsic and slightly p-doped samples. Each sample was divided in several pieces, over which increasing Ni concentrations were sputtered. Two crystallization methods are compared, conventional furnace annealing (CFA) and rapid thermal annealing (RTA). The crystallization was followed by optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy observations, X-ray diffraction, and reflectance measurements in the UV region. The large grain sizes obtained - larger than 100 μm for the samples crystallized by CFA - are very encouraging for the preparation of low-cost thin film polycrystalline silicon solar cells.