Optimization of intrinsic layer thickness, dopant layer thickness and concentration for a-SiC/a-SiGe multilayer solar cell efficiency performance using Silvaco software

¹ School of Microelectronic Engineering, Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Pauh Putra Campus, 02600 Arau, Perlis, Malaysia.
² Centre of Excellence Geopolymer and Green Technology (CeGeoGTech), Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Perlis, Malaysia.
³ Advanced Multi-Disciplinary MEMS-Based Integrated NCER Centre of Excellence (AMBIENCE), Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Perlis, Malaysia.

^* Corresponding author: mohdnatashah@unimap.edu.my

Published online: 22 November 2017

Abstract

Solar cell is expanding as green renewable alternative to conventional fossil fuel electricity generation, but compared to other land-used electrical generators, it is a comparative beginner. Many applications covered by solar cells starting from low power mobile devices, terrestrial, satellites and many more. To date, the highest efficiency solar cell is given by GaAs based multilayer solar cell. However, this material is very expensive in fabrication and material costs compared to silicon which is cheaper due to the abundance of supply. Thus, this research is devoted to develop multilayer solar cell by combining two different layers of P-I-N structures with silicon carbide and silicon germanium. This research focused on optimising the intrinsic layer thickness, p-doped layer thickness and concentration, n-doped layer thickness and concentration in achieving the highest efficiency. As a result, both single layer a-SiC and a-SiGe showed positive efficiency improvement with the record of 27.19% and 9.07% respectively via parametric optimization. The optimized parameters is then applied on both SiC and SiGe P-I-N layers and resulted the convincing efficiency of 33.80%.