Light management in thin film silicon solar cells

Abstract

Thin film silicon is a mature and reliable technology that scales extraordinarily well from lab-cells to production modules.

Plasma Textured Glass Surface Morphologies for Amorphous Silicon Thin Film Solar Cells-A review

“…Silicate glasses are generally resistant to most gases and liquids and at room temperature they are only readily dissolved by hydrofluoric acid or other HF containing aqueous solutions. These glasses are used for variety of applications with controlled dissolution in HF-based etchants [44][45][46][47]65].…”

“…Figure 1 shows various light trapping surface morphologies for the TCO films. Figure 1(a) and 1(b) represents textured TCO surface morphologies of SnO 2 :F and ZnO:B films being employed by the Ashai-U research group [46,[56][57][58][59][60][61]. The ZnO:B films were grown by low pressure CVD (LP-CVD) from precursors of diethyl-zinc and H 2 O; the conductivity was easily controlled by using di-borane as the dopant source [58,59] [1,6,7].…”

Effects of hydrogen pressure on hydrogenated amorphous silicon thin films prepared by low‐temperature reactive pulsed laser deposition

“…can be easily adjusted in order to effectively control the film properties. Because it relies on the generation of atomic species with high kinetic energy, due to the high photon energy laser sources typically employed, it allows for low substrate temperatures during fabrication, as opposed to most of the alternative deposition methods, which require deposition temperatures exceeding 200 o C in order to achieve improved film properties [14,15]. Low processing temperatures are often required in microelectronic fabrication and play a decisive role on the compatibility of a physical or chemical process with microelectronic engineering.…”

Self-Organized Nanoscale Roughness Engineering for Broadband Light Trapping in Thin Film Solar Cells

“…The need for light trapping is vital for the amorphous silicon based cells, both because of the weak absorption coefficient and for the limitations on the feasible thickness, due to the relatively poor electronic quality of the 2 of 15 materials which calls for a drift-based p-i-n design [10]. Thanks to its maturity, this technology is thus often used as a platform for testing advanced approaches aimed at improving light management [3]. Here, a self-organized method for fabricating and tailoring nanostructured glasses to be applied as substrates promoting photon harvesting is presented and thin film silicon solar cells are once again used as the test-bed.…”

“…To increase the photocurrent and then the power conversion efficiency, light harvesting strategies have to be introduced in order to trap the light in the active region while minimizing reflection and parasitic absorption. Based on the significant prospective benefits of reduced thickness, such as lower production costs and feasibility of materials with lower carrier diffusion length, the design of efficient light-management concepts is achieving more and more importance [1][2][3][4]. Both more mature technologies and the emerging families of polymer and perovskite solar cells can gain from the implementation of such strategies [5][6][7][8][9].…”