Low degradation and high annealing effects of amorphous silicon multilayer processed through alternate hydrogen dilution

Abstract

Alternately hydrogen diluted a-Si:H multilayer is shown to be a promising concept for the fabrication of stable a-Si:H solar cells or other a-Si:H based devices. The alternately hydrogen diluted amorphous silicon multilayers were obtained by toggling both the H/sub 2//SiH/sub 4/ dilution ratio and the total flow rate of the gases under continuous UV light irradiation into the reaction chamber of a photo-chemical vapor deposition system. The authors applied these multilayers as the active layer of p-i-n type thin film solar cells. They report on the light-soaking and the annealing behavior of the solar cells. The multilayer solar cell has exceptionally high recovery rate at low temperatures, which makes the solar cell degradation behavior highly sensitive to the cell temperature during degradation.