The use of Corning® Willow™ glass for flexible CdTe solar cells

New flexible glass products should enable the fabrication of high efficiency, flexible CdTe devices because of their high optical transmission and compatibility with the high temperature processing conditions often used for making high performance CdTe solar cells. Here, we will report on our preliminary results using Corning^® Willow™ Glass in a high temperature CdTe device fabrication process. For all device studies, we used MOCVD deposited SnO₂:F/SnO₂ bilayers as the transparent conducting oxide/buffer. We investigated CdS window layers deposited by both room temperature sputtering and chemical bath deposition (CBD). Using 550°C CdTe layers deposited by close-spaced sublimation (CSS) on both types of CdS layers, we made CdTe devices with efficiencies above 12% with Willow Glass. These efficiencies are comparable to identically processed devices on rigid glass, confirming that Willow Glass is compatible with all high temperature CdTe processing steps.