Hybrid Si Microwire and Planar Solar Cells: Passivation and Characterization

Kim, Dong Rip; Lee, Chi Hwan; Rao, Pratap M.; Cho, In Sun; Zheng, Xiaolin

doi:10.1021/nl2009636

Cited by 153 publications

(119 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…The reduction in the surface recombination (SR) rate of nanowire-based solar cells results in an increase of open-circuit voltage, short-circuit current and efficiency [5,13,14]. However, the effect of the SR rate strongly depends on the junction configuration.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Field-effect passivation on silicon nanowire solar cells

et al. 2014

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Surface recombination represents a handicap for high-efficiency solar cells. This is especially important for nanowire array solar cells, where the surface-to-volume ratio is greatly enhanced. Here, the effect of different passivation materials on the effective recombination and on the device performance is experimentally analyzed. Our solar cells are large area top-down axial n-p junction silicon nanowires fabricated by means of Near-Field Phase-Shift Lithography (NF-PSL). We report an efficiency of 9.9% for the best cell, passivated with a SiO 2 /SiN x stack. The impact of the presence of a surface fixed charge density at the silicon/oxide interface is studied.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Field-effect passivation on silicon nanowire solar cells

et al. 2014

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“…32 In this case, the band offsets required for the minority carrier mirror effect practically disappear, and the device experiences operation similar to a diffused homojunction with high saturation current. Such cells would need an actual passivation layer such as silicon nitride 20 and will only produce acceptable efficiencies in sparse wire arrays, which are not appropriate for low quality start material.…”

Section: 25mentioning

confidence: 99%

Heterojunction Silicon Microwire Solar Cells

et al. 2012

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We report radial heterojunction solar cells of amorphous silicon on crystalline silicon microwires with high surface passivation. While the shortened collection path is exploited to increase the photocurrent, proper choice of the wire radius and the highly passivated surface prevent drastic decrease in the voltage due to high surface-to-volume ratio. The heterojunction is formed by depositing a ∼12−16 nm of amorphous silicon on crystalline silicon wires of radius approximately equal to minority carrier diffusion length (∼10 μm). In spite of very short carrier lifetime (<1 μs), the microwire array devices generate photocurrent of ∼30 mA/cm 2 , and the same time, voltages close to 600 mV are achieved, leading to efficiency in excess of 12% in extremely short carrier lifetime silicon. We also find that formation of nanocrystallites of silicon in the deposited film results in loss of the expected passivation.

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“…The conventional surface texturing with alkaline or acidic solution for sub-10-mmthick Si substrates requires additional masking steps including photolithography 15 , and it is hard to implement on thin substrates with high yield 16 . In the past several years, significant effort has been focused on enhancing the light absorption by nanoscale light trapping using nanowires 8,[17][18][19] , nanocones [20][21][22] , nanodomes 7 and nanoholes [23][24][25][26] . Despite the exciting success in light trapping, the power conversion efficiencies of nanostructured Si solar cells, however, remain below 19% for thick devices 26 and below 11% for thin devices 27 .…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%