Abstract Effective tunnel recombination junctions (TRJs) are crucial to achieve high conversion efficiencies in hydrogenated amorphous/ microcrystalline silicon (a-Si:H/μc-Si:H) micromorph solar cells. In conventional TRJs, the n-μc-Si:H layer is used to form an ohmic contact between the n- and p-type layers, which introduces additional absorption loss in the TRJs. Here we demonstrated an effective TRJ without using the n-μc-Si:H layer in a-Si:H/μc-Si:H micromorph solar cells, which we denote as an evolutionary TRJ. In comparison to the conventional n-μc-SiO x :H/n-μc-Si:H/p-nc-SiO x :H TRJs, the evolutionary structure reduces the parasitic absorption and thus significantly increases the short-circuit current density ( J SC ) of the bottom cell. A high initial efficiency of 13.65% has been achieved for the a-Si:H/μc-Si:H micromorph solar cells deposited on the as-grown metal organic chemical vapor deposited ZnO:B substrates.