Triple-junction solar cells from III-V compound semiconductors have thus far delivered the highest solar-electric conversion efficiencies. Increasing the number of junctions generally offers the potential to reach even higher efficiencies, but material quality and the choice of bandgap energies turn out to be even more importance than the number of junctions. Several four-junction solar cell architectures with optimum bandgap combination are found for lattice-mismatched III-V semiconductors as high bandgap materials predominantly possess smaller lattice constant than low bandgap materials. Direct wafer bonding offers a new opportunity to combine such mismatched materials through a permanent, electrically conductive and optically transparent interface. In this work, a GaAs-based top tandem solar cell structure was bonded to an InP-based bottom tandem cell with a difference in lattice constant of 3.7%. The result is a GaInP/GaAs//GaInAsP/GaInAs four-junction solar cell with a new record efficiency of 44.7% at 297-times concentration of the AM1.5d (ASTM G173-03) spectrum. This work demonstrates a successful pathway for reaching highest conversion efficiencies with III-V multi-junction solar cells having four and in the future even more junctions.

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We present experimental results on the activation and diffusion behaviors of boron in silicon-on-insulator and strained silicon-on-insulator using standard rapid thermal processing treatments as well as flash lamp annealing. After boron implantation at different doses and at a low energy of 1 keV, samples were annealed to activate the dopants, and secondary ion mass spectrometry and Hall measurements were carried out to determine boron diffusion and the amount of activated dopants, respectively. In contrast to rapid thermal annealing, flash lamp annealing enables the activation without significant diffusion of dopants. In addition, we investigated the effect of coating the samples with antireflection layers to increase the absorbed energy during flash annealing. As a result, the activation was increased significantly to values comparable with the activation obtained with standard annealing. Furthermore, the relation between the observed boron diffusion and activation as a function of the implantation and annealing parameters is discussed in terms of the kinetics of the defects involved in these processes.

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