Reflection Coefficient Calculation of a Structure Including a Porous Silicon Layer with Transfer Matrix Method and FDTD

Abstract

Porous silicon is an important material for a variety of application area such as anti-reflective coating for solar cells. Today, solar cell market is mostly dominated by silicon based solar cells. Porous silicon thin films are easy to fabricate and it is compatible with silicon technology. Designing porous silicon anti-reflective coating layers is a critical issue to enhance silicon based solar cell performance. There are several methods to calculate reflection coefficient of porous silicon thin layers. In this study, transfer matrix method and finite-difference time-domain method are used to calculate reflection coefficient of porous silicon thin layers. Because finite-difference time-domain method gives more accurate results, the results obtained with finite-difference time-domain method are used to control the results obtained with transfer matrix method. In transfer matrix method, refractive indices of the porous silicon layers are calculated with Bruggeman effective medium approximation.