An empirical investigation of the InP shallow-homojunction solar cell

An experimental study of the performance of epitaxially grown InP shallow-homojunction solar cells as a function of the thickness and carrier concentration in the base and emitter layers is presented. Idenfification of improvements to cell design leading to higher performance is emphasized. As a result, using a near-optimum set of design parameters, cells with conversion efficiencies of 20.3% (global) and 17.6% (AM0) have been achieved. For such cells, it is shown that the internal response of the base layer is essentially perfect, whereas the emitter-layer properties can be improved substantially and warrant further investigation. Discrepancies between the results of the present study and those of earlier modeling efforts are discussed.