Dislocation‐related photoluminescence imaging of mc‐Si wafers at room temperature

We report on a method for fast detection of defect rich areas in multicrystalline silicon solar wafers. It is based on photoluminescence imaging of the whole wafers and detects both the band‐to‐band radiation as well as the dislocation specific radiation D1. To illustrate the capabilities of the method we examined 5.0 × 5.0 cm² wafer pieces in different stages of their processing. The achieved resolution of the D1 images was ∼120 μm, within a total recording time of 550 ms.