Investigation of doped a-Si<inf>1&#x2212;x</inf>C<inf>x</inf>:H as a novel back contact material for CdTe solar cells

Back contacts materials used in thin film CdTe solar cells—A review

“…Koirala et al (2014) 209 studied PECVD grown silicon alloyed with carbon, heavily p-type doped with hydrogen and boron (a-Si 1-x C x :H) as a CdTe back contact material. The devices had a high series resistance (12 Ω cm 2 ), reducing FF (48.8%) compared to their reference Cu/Au contacts (FF 67%).…”

Novel Contact Materials for Improved Performance CdTe Solar Cells Final Report

“…Amorphous Si was considered in analogy to the HIT contacts to Si solar cells but the hydrogen in the material was thought to degrade the CdTe devices and no satisfactory contact was obtained. [3] In addition FeS2 was studied and found to produce the best contact to CdTe. [4][5][6] (a) Activities at University of Illinois in Doping of Chalcopyrite Materials CuInSe2, Cu(In0.7Ga0.3)Se2, and AgInSe2 films were grown using a hybrid sputtering and evaporation technique.…”

“…Amorphous Si:H was tested and found to degrade the performance of the CdTe devices over time. [3] FeS2 was tested and found to produce very promising contacts. [4][5][6] Novel back contact materials will be deposited at UI and ODU on baseline CdTe solar cells without back contacts.…”

“…[4,6,11] [10] The other materials tested did not produce good contacts. [1][2][3] [2] We developed improved methods for process control and monitoring during deposition of the materials we tested. [7,16] We showed that we could determine the current flow pathways in CdTe devices using scanning microwave impedance microscopy, which advances the general understanding of the devices [13,14].…”