Fully passivated radial junction nanowire silicon solar cells with submerged nickel-silicide contact for efficiency enhancement

Author

Ren, R. ; Guo, Yong Xin ; Wang, Jiacheng ; Zhu, R.H.

Author_Institution

Sch. of Electron. Eng. & Optoelectron. Tech., Nanjing Univ. of Sci. & Technol., Nanjing, China

Volume

49

Issue

12

fYear

2013

fDate

June 6 2013

Firstpage

767

Lastpage

769

Abstract

Presented is a silicon solar cell model with fully passivated radial junction nanowire surface decoration and submerged nickel-silicide contact. Numerical simulations using a finite-difference time-domain method have been done to investigate the spectral responses of the solar cell model. The experimental results indicate that, with proper nickel-silicide thickness, the fill factor of the cell can be improved considerably without much degradation on short circuit current density. Under AM 1.5G illumination, the silicon nanowire solar cell device with 50 Å nickel-silicide contact has short circuit current density of 26.3 mA/cm², open circuit voltage of 586 mV and fill factor of 70.0%, contributing to power conversion efficiency of 10.8%, which is 19% higher than the control device without the nickel-silicide contact.

Keywords

current density; elemental semiconductors; finite difference time-domain analysis; nanowires; nickel compounds; power conversion; short-circuit currents; silicon; solar cells; Si-NiSi; control device; efficiency enhancement; fill factor; finite-difference time-domain method; numerical simulation; open circuit voltage; passivated radial junction nanowire surface decoration; power conversion efficiency; short circuit current density; silicon solar cell model; spectral response; submerged nickel-silicide contact;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Electronics Letters

Publisher

iet

ISSN

0013-5194

Type

jour

DOI

10.1049/el.2013.0998

Filename

6550147