Chapter 2 - Growth Process of I-III-VI 2 Thin Films

Abstract

Publisher Summary The chapter discusses the famous growth techniques for the deposition of Cu(In 1– x Ga x )Se 2 and CuIn (Se 1– x S x ) 2 absorbers that have been developed, such as thermal vacuum evaporation and low-cost nonvacuum process methods. There are several diversified techniques to grow semiconducting thin films, some of them are costly and others being cost effective. The plausible techniques to grow CIS thin films are vacuum evaporation, flash evaporation, sputtering, spray pyrolysis, chemical method, etc. The flash evaporation technique can be used instead of evaporation by effusion cells for large area coatings. The advantage of sputtering is that the chamber gets heated relatively low, comparing with other techniques and the deposition can easily be controllable by plasma current. Spray pyrolysis is one of the low-cost techniques and has been employed by different groups for the preparation of CuInSe 2 films. The CuInGaSe 2 (CIGS) thin films are prepared by various vacuum and nonvacuum techniques, which are discussed in the chapter. The Mo layer is one of the influential candidates for the growth of CIGS layers, which acts as a bottom contact layer for thin film solar cell. The nonvacuum process is one of the advantageous methods to reduce fabrication cost of solar cell as compared to that of cells made with vacuum processed CIGS absorber layers.