High efficiency 1 micron thick sputtered CdTe solar cells

Author

Gupta, Akhlesh ; Compaan, Alvin D.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Phys. & Astron., Toledo Univ., OH, USA

fYear

2005

fDate

3-7 Jan. 2005

Firstpage

235

Lastpage

238

Abstract

Large scale (gigawatts/yr) manufacturing of CdTe PV modules may be constrained due to the limited availability of the relatively rare (Te) element and the volume of potentially hazardous (Cd) material being used in 3-8 μm thick CdTe absorber layer. This work is focused on cells with much thinner CdTe layers. Magnetron sputtering was used to prepare a series of CdS/CdTe cells with CdTe thickness from 0.5 to 1.28 μm. Optimization of the post-deposition CdCl₂ treatment and back contact processing for the thinner layers improves the efficiency to very close to thicker CdTe cells. An efficiency of 11.8% has been achieved using only 0.87 μm of CdTe. This cell showed V_OC of 772 mV, J_SC of 21.98 mA/cm² and FF of 69.7%.

Keywords

II-VI semiconductors; cadmium compounds; semiconductor thin films; solar cells; sputter deposition; thin film devices; 0.5 to 1.28 mum; 11.8 percent; 3 to 8 mum; 772 mV; CdCl₂; CdS/CdTe cells; CdTe PV modules; CdTe absorber layer; CdTe-CdS; back contact processing; high efficiency solar cells; large scale manufacturing; magnetron sputtering; post-deposition treatment optimization; sputtered CdTe solar cells; Absorption; Astronomy; Glass; Large-scale systems; Manufacturing; Photonic band gap; Photovoltaic cells; Physics; Tellurium; X-ray scattering;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Photovoltaic Specialists Conference, 2005. Conference Record of the Thirty-first IEEE

ISSN

0160-8371

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8707-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/PVSC.2005.1488112

Filename

1488112