Method and equipment for treating a precursor of a heterojunction photovoltaic cell and associated method for producing a photovoltaic cell

A piece of equipment for processing a precursor of a heterojunction photovoltaic cell, comprising:

• a grounded conducting plate;
• a plate made of an insulating material coated with a conducting layer, the two plates being arranged to sandwich a photovoltaic cell precursor to be processed, the precursor comprising at least one layer of doped crystalline silicon and one layer of doped amorphous semiconductor material;
• an electrical voltage generator connected to the conducting layer;
• a heating device;
• a cooling device;
• a control module designed to control the operation of the electrical voltage generator, of the heating device and of the cooling device so as to apply a state change electrical voltage between the conducting layer and ground, the state change electrical voltage being designed to bring the Fermi level at an interface between crystalline silicon and amorphous semiconductor material closer to the middle of the band gap of the amorphous semiconductor material, while at the same time heating the cell precursor to a defect equilibration temperature, then to cool down the precursor prior to interrupting the application of the state change electrical voltage.