Intrinsic amorphous silicon oxide (alpha-Si1-xOx:H) buffer layers were deposited on both sides of crystalline silicon (c-Si) wafers using plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) technique. The input gas flow ratio of carbon dioxide (CO2) to silane (SiH4) was varied in a wide range to study the passivation and structural properties of the a-Si1-xOx:H buffer layers. In this work, when the a-Si1-xOx:H layer was quite thick (>15 nm), an extremely high effective lifetime of similar to 10 ms was achieved on the n-type float-zone c-Si (similar to 3 Omega-cm, similar to 280 mu m) at moderate CO2/SiH4 flow ratios, resulting in an exceptionally low surface recombination velocity (<1.4 cm/s). However, when CO2/SiH4 flow ratio was either rather low (<0.13) or extremely high (>0.47), the surface passivation quality would deteriorate significantly. In addition, a certain amount of epitaxial phase (epi-Si) was observed in some excellent buffer layers made at the moderate CO2/SiH4 ratios. Moreover, it was found that the epi-Si content could be gradually suppressed by slightly increasing the CO2/SiH4 ratio without affecting passivation quality. When the alpha-Si1-xOx:H buffer layer thickness was kept at only a few nanometers as required by silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells, the PECVD optimum condition (CO2/SiH4 ratio) for buffer layers was revealed by applying the a-Si1-xOx:H buffer layers directly in a practical SHJ solar cell. We found that when the alpha-Si1-xOx:H buffer layer containing a certain amount (similar to 22%) of epi-Si was employed at the back-surface-field side of the solar cell, a high open-circuit voltage (VOC) and a high fill factor (FF) were obtained at the same time. By contrast, at the emitter side of the solar cell, only the buffer layer without any epi-Si can be used to provide high-quality surface passivation for an excellent SHJ solar cell. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V.