Parallel FDTD Simulation of Photonic Crystals and Thin-Film Solar Cells

Finite difference time domain (FDTD) method is a robust and accurate algorithm which is widely used in computational electromagnetic field and the simulation of optical phenomenon. In this paper, parallel FDTD based on overlapped domain decomposition is used to simulate the band gap of photonic crystals and the quantum efficiency of thin film solar cells. The light-trapping effect is also analyzed by parallel FDTD, it´s very important to improve light absorption. Numerical result demonstrates that the accuracy and the speedup of parallel FDTD are very high for large scale problem.