Double-Ring Shaded-Contact Photovoltaic Cell Designed on Standard CMOS Process

Abstract

This study presents the design of a novel onchip photovoltaic device structure. The aim of this study is to avoid shading loss using a double ring structure. The proposed structure forms all contacts under shaded area; therefore, it is free from optical losses due to electrode shading. In addition, this design enhances integration by utilizing the photovoltaic cell space under the shading metals. This space can be used for interconnections or capacitors. The results indicate that the proposed structure significantly improves cell performance by avoiding light shading loss with the shaded contacts. It was observed that the cell efficiency improved by approximately 0.5% <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>abs</i></sub> when compared with the conventional structure, indicating that this is the best performance among several on-chip photovoltaic cell devices.