The Chinese PV manufacturer has achieved a new efficiency breakthrough for its PERC solar cells, with the help of nanostructured black silicon. GCL-SI plans to reach an efficiency of up to 21.0% by the end of this year.

GCL System Integration Technology (GCL-SI) has raised the efficiency of its PERC solar cells to 20.1% in mass production by utilizing Reactive Ion Etching (RIE) technology. The best test performance was 20.6%, as the Chinese PV manufacturer announced on Wednesday.

Black silicon offers an exremely low reflectance and absorption of some kinds of photons, making this marterial particularly useful in PV-cell technology. Until now, however, there had been problems with the texturing that bocked the introduction of diamond wire sawing of mc-SI into mass production. According to GCL-SI, this problem was solved effectively with nanostructured black silicon“We have now effectively resolved the issue of multi-crystalline PERC cell degradation and power loss. Through proper regeneration annealing processing, an additional absolute efficiency gain up to 0.15% can be reached. Furthermore, the LID results show properly treated cells have significant improvement in degradation behavior with less than 1% relative efficiency loss,” said Dr. Zhang Chun, head of GCL-SI’s R&D cell team GCL-SI claims, that the process was already introduced in February this year and announced that it will continue its efforts to scale up the mass production of PERCs. “GCL-SI will further advance towards the goal of realizing an average efficiency of 20.5% and a maximum efficiency of somewhere between 20.8% and 21% in 2017” Chun concludes.