Phang, S. P.Macdonald, D.2015-12-032015-12-030021-8979http://hdl.handle.net/1885/16985This paper presents a direct quantitative comparison of the effectiveness of borondiffusion, phosphorus diffusion, and aluminumalloying in removing interstitial iron in crystalline silicon in the context of silicon solar cells. Phosphorus diffusion gettering was effective in removing more than 90% of the interstitial iron across a range of diffusion temperatures, sheet resistances, and iron doses. Even relatively light phosphorus diffusions (145 Ω/□) were found to give very effective gettering, especially when combined with extended low temperature annealing.Aluminumalloying was extremely effective and removed more than 99% of the implanted iron for a range of alloying temperatures and aluminum film thicknesses. In contrast, our experimental results showed that borondiffusion gettering is very sensitive to the deposition conditions and can change from less than 5% of the Fe being gettered to more than 99.9% gettered by changing only the gas flow ratios and the post-oxidation step.http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/issn/0021-8979..."Publishers version/PDF may be used on author's personal website, institutional website or institutional repository" from SHERPA/RoMEO site (as at 3/12/15). Copyright 2011 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in Journal of Applied Physics and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3569890Keywords: Aluminum film; Aluminum gettering; Boron diffusions; Crystalline silicons; Deposition conditions; Diffusion temperature; Gas-flow ratio; Gettering; Interstitial iron; Low temperature annealing; Phosphorus diffusion; Post-oxidation; Quantitative comparison2011-04-1310.1063/1.35698902016-02-24