Renewable energy research is currently a major challenge. In recent years, the worldwide production of crystalline silicon solar cells has increased by approximately 30%.[1] New concepts for solar cells and new silicon feedstock are generated in the labs and on the solar cell market. Hence, the need for quality control and failure analysis of solar cells in research and industry has increased r...

An 18 μm thin crystalline silicon solar cell was demonstrated, and its best open circuit voltage is 642.3 mV. However, this value is far from the cell’s theoretical upper limit in an ideal case. This paper explores the open circuit voltage losses of the thin silicon solar cell, starting from the ideal case, through first principle calculation and experiments. The open circuit voltage losses com...

Silicon solar cells incorporating double-sided pyramidal texture are capable of superior light trapping over cells with front-side only texture. However, increased surface area, roughness and exposed <111> crystal planes of textured surfaces not only causes increased recombination, but also makes cells susceptible to shunting through pinholes in the dielectric at the sharp peaks and valleys of ...

An approximate expression proposed by Green predicts the maximum obtainable fill factor (FF) of a solar cell from its open-circuit voltage (Voc). The expression was originally suggested for silicon solar cells that behave according to a single-diode model and, in addition to Voc, it requires an ideality factor as input. It is now commonly applied to silicon cells by assuming a unity ideality fa...

The increasing demand for photovoltaic devices and the associated crystalline silicon feedstock demand scenario have led in the past years to the fast growth of the thin film silicon industry. The high potential for cost reduction and the suitability for building integration have initiated both industrial and research laboratories dynamisms for amorphous silicon and micro-crystalline silicon ba...

Doped ZnO layers deposited by Low Pressure Chemical Vapour Deposition technique have been studied for their use as transparent contact layers for thin-film silicon solar cells. The effect of a variation in the doping level of the front LP-CVD ZnO on solar cell performance is investigated. Based on these experimental results, authors propose to evaluate the effect of the different ZnO layer prop...

In this study, we investigate the reflectance property of the cylinder, right circular cone, and square pyramid shapes of silicon nitride (Si3N4) subwavelength structure (SWS) with respect to different designing parameters. In terms of three critical factors, the reflectance for physical characteristics of wavelength dependence, the reflected power density for real power reflection applied on s...

A DC-DC step-up micro power converter for solar energy harvesting applications is presented. The circuit is based on a switchedcapacitor voltage tripler architecture with MOSFET capacitors, which results in an area approximately eight times smaller than using MiM capacitors for the 0.13μm CMOS technology. In order to compensate for the loss of efficiency, due to the larger parasitic capacitance...