Outstanding surface passivation of low‐resistivity single‐crystallinep‐silicon is reported using silicon nitride fabricated at low temperature (375 °C) in a remote plasma‐enhanced chemical vapor deposition system. The effective surface recombination velocitySeffis determined as a function of the bulk injection level from light‐biased photoconductance decay measurements. On polished as well as chemically textured silicon wafers we find that our remote plasma silicon nitride provides better surface passivation than the best high‐temperature thermal oxides ever reported. For polished 1.5 and 0.7 &OHgr; cmp‐silicon wafers, record lowSeffvalues of 4 and 20 cm/s, respectively, are presented. ©1996 American Institute of Physics.