Conversion efficiency improvement of ELO GaAs solar cell, deposited on water soluble sacrificial buffer

Abstract

We demonstrate the improvement of power conversion efficiency of an epitaxially-lifted-off single junction GaAs solar cell deposited on a water-soluble sacrificial buffer architecture by introducing an additional germanium (Ge) interlayer between GaAs and the fluoride buffer. The epitaxial lift-off (ELO) technique has been extensively used to separate III-V device layers from their single crystal GaAs substrates. However, conventional ELO requires the use of concentrated hydrofluoric acid (HF) for extended times to etch out the sacrificial layer, subsequently degrading the surface roughness of the parent wafer. As a result, the wafer has to undergo expensive and intensive chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) processes, costing about 25 % of a pristine 6-inch GaAs substrate. In our previous work, we demonstrated a method to eliminating the need for CMP post-processing by using water-assisted ELO (H2O-ELO). A water-soluble, 3-layer buffer architecture was developed using alkaline earth compounds. However, devices suffered low performance due to a high defect density in the GaAs active layers. A Ge interlayer was introduced to provide a more favorable surface energy for GaAs growth, which leads to an improvement of GaAs crystal quality. The Ge deposition conditions were optimized to achieve a high-quality Ge layer on triple-layer fluoride buffer. Single junction GaAs devices fabricated on Ge/(Ca,Sr)F2/BaF2/(Ca,Sr)F2 showed improvement of solar cell performance parameters featuring increases in Voc by 23.7 %, and fill factor (F.F.) by 4.9 %, which results in an overall improvement of power conversion efficiency from 10.3 % to 12.69 %.