Conventionally, a conductive paste containing, for example, a silver powder, a binder, a solvent, and a glass frit has been used. The conductive paste is required to have high conductivity as its property.
Under such circumstances, a conductive paste for an electrode of a solar cell has been proposed, where the conductive paste uses as a glass frit a tellurium-based glass frit (hereinafter may also be referred to as “a tellurium-based glass powder”) containing a tellurium oxide to reduce contact resistance and provides good solar cell characteristics (see, for example, PTL 1).
Also, the present inventors have proposed a silver-coated glass powder where silver is coated on glass particles, and a method for producing the silver-coated glass powder (see, for example, PTL 2).