High Efficiency Thin Film Silicon Solar Cells

High-efficiency solar cells based on amorphous silicon technology are designed. Multi-junction amorphous silicon solar cells are discussed, how these are made and how their performance can be understood and optimized. Although significant amount of work has been carried out in the last twenty-five years, the Staebler-Wronski effect has limited the development of a-Si:H solar cells. As an alternative material, nc-Si:H has attracted remarkable attention. Taking advantage of a lower degradation in nc-Si:H than a-Si:H and a-SiGe:H alloys, the light induced degradation in triple junction structures has been minimized by designing a bottom-cell-limited current mismatching, and obtained a stable active-area cell efficiency. All this has been investigated in this paper.