Abstract
Hydrogenated microcrystalline silicon thin films can be used to fabricate stable thin film solar cell, which were deposited by very high frequency plasma‐enhanced chemical vapor deposition at low temperatures (~200°C). It has been found that the obtained film presented excellent structural and electrical properties, such as high growth rate and good crystallinity. With the decreasing of silane concentration, the optical gap and the dark conductivity increased, whereas the activation energy decreased. A reasonable explanation was presented to elucidate these phenomena. In addition, we fabricated p‐i‐n structure solar cells using the optimum microcrystalline silicon thin films, and preliminary efficiency of 4.6% was obtained for 1 μm thick microcrystalline silicon thin film solar cells with open‐circuits voltage of 0.773 V and short‐circuits current density of 12.28 mA/cm2. Future scope for performance improvement lies mainly in further increasing the short‐circuit current.
Highlights
Hydrogenated microcrystalline silicon is an interesting material as an absorber layer for solar cells
We reported that the μc-Si:H thin films could be deposited with the optimum crystallization at 250∘C at the rate of ∼3.54 nm/min by using radio frequency (RF)-plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) of
We focused our research on the application of 81.3 MHz very high frequency (VHF) PECVD to improve the material properties
Summary
Hydrogenated microcrystalline silicon (μc-Si:H) is an interesting material as an absorber layer for solar cells. High deposition rates are necessary to make this material a good candidate for industrial production [2]. In this regard, many studies based on plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) have been made to improve the growth rate and the film quality, especially for the crystallinity [3, 4]. The very high frequency (VHF) PECVD technique is one of the most acceptable approaches to grow device quality μc-Si thin films within a short fabrication time, owing to efficient gas dissociation and lower ion energy than radio frequency (RF) plasma [5, 6]. The thin film solar cells with high efficiencies have already been made using this technique [7, 8]. The results on preliminary μc-Si:H thin film solar cells were presented
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