DESIGNING BOTTOM SILICON SOLAR CELLS

FOR MULTIJUNCTION DEVICES

ABSTRACT
We report on efforts to design high-efficiency silicon homojunction subcells for use in
multijunction stack devices. Both simulation and experimental works have been performed
looking at a silicon solar cell under a truncated spectrum below 1.5 eV filtered by the upper
layers in the multijunction stack. Good agreement is seen between themodeling and experimental
results, identifying different emitter design requirements when the solar cell operates under a full
or truncated spectrum. A well-passivated front surface, i.e., with low-interface surface
recombination velocity, required a lightly doped emitter profile tomaximize open-circuit voltage
(VOC), while a high-interface recombination surface requires a heavily doped for higher VOC
values. The impact on short-circuit current density (JSC ) is found to be minimal, even with large
variations in the interface recombination and emitter profiles. In a tandem stack, an interfacewith
low- and high-interface recombination velocities would require lightly doped and intermediatedoped emitters, respectively, for maximum conversion efficiency ().