Analysis of effects of front and back surface dopants on silicon vertical multi-junction solar cell by 2D numerical simulation

Abstract

The silicon vertical multi-junction (VMJ) solar cell has a good potential in high concentration, but it requires high quality front and back surface passivation layers to keep its high efficiency. We try to add dopants into the front and back surfaces of the VMJ cell to release this strict requirement in this work. The effects of recombination velocities, doping types and doping profiles of front and back surfaces on the performance of the P-type VMJ cell were calculated under 1 sun and 1000 suns. The 2D numerical simulation tool TCAD software was used. The performance of the VMJ cell without front and back surface dopants was also calculated for comparison. It was found that the requirement of high quality front and back surface passivation layers could be released remarkably by adding either N-type or P+-type front and back surface dopants. For the two types of front surface dopants, the highest efficiencies of the cells were got by light dopant; for the two types of back surface dopants, the doping type and profile affected little on the performance of the cell in our calculation range. It was also found that the series resistance of the VMJ cell with N-type front surface dopant was decreased by the 2D effect of front surface emitter. The VMJ cell with P+-type front surface dopant had the highest efficiency under 1000 suns and the VMJ cell with N-type front surface dopant had the highest efficiency under 1 sun in our calculation range.