Silicon Thin-Film Solar Cells

Thin-film Silicon Solar Cells

The simplest semiconductor junction that is used in solar cells for separating photogenerated charge carriers is the p-n junction, an interface between the p-type region and ntype region of one semiconductor. Therefore, the basic semiconductor property of a material, the possibility to vary its conductivity by doping, has to be demonstrated first before the material can be considered as a suita...

Thin-film crystalline silicon solar cells

A photoelectric conversion efficiency of over 10% has been achieved in thin-film polycrystalline silicon solar cells which consists of a 2 μm thick layer of polycrystalline silicon with a very small grain size (microcrystalline silicon) formed by low-temperature plasma CVD. This has shown that if the recombination velocity at grain boundaries can be made very small, then it is not necessarily i...

Crystalline Silicon Thin Film Solar Cells

Design of Silicon Nano-Bars Anti-Reflection Coating to Enhance Thin Film Solar Cells Efficiency

In this paper a novel anti-reflection (AR) coating based on silicon nano-bars is designed and its impact on the performance of crystalline silicon (c-Si) thin-film solar cells is extensively studied. Silicon nano-bars with optimized size and period are embedded on top of the active layer, under a 100nm Si3N4 layer. As a result of the proposed layer stack, an inhomogeneous intermediate layer wit...

Nanoimprint lithography for high-efficiency thin-film silicon solar cells.

We demonstrate high-efficiency thin-film silicon solar cells with transparent nanotextured front electrodes fabricated via ultraviolet nanoimprint lithography on glass substrates. By replicating the morphology of state-of-the-art nanotextured zinc oxide front electrodes known for their exceptional light trapping properties, conversion efficiencies of up to 12.0% are achieved for micromorph tand...