Betavoltaic battery prepared by using polycrystalline CdTe as absorption layer

Abstract

Betavoltaic microbattery is the main energy supply unit in MEMS, which has the advantages of stable performance, long service life, high energy density and small scale. The current paper presented a design scheme of betavoltaic microbattery with semiconductor material polycrystalline CdTe and 3H radioactive source. In this paper, the properties of polycrystalline CdTe films with different thicknesses and the performance of corresponding devices were tested. In the proposed design scheme, an average energy of 5.7 keV was deposited in the polycrystalline CdTe. The short circuit current density and open circuit voltage of a single device were 5.53 nA/cm2 and 111.2 mV respectively when the thickness of polycrystalline CdTe film was 400 nm.