Fabrication and characterization of Al2O3 /Si composite nanodome structures for high efficiency crystalline Si thin film solar cells

Abstract

We report on our fabrication and characterization of Al2O3/Si composite nanodome (CND) structures, which is composed of Si nanodome structures with a conformal cladding Al2O3 layer to evaluate its optical and electrical performance when it is applied to thin film solar cells. It has been observed that by application of Al2O3thin film coating using atomic layer deposition (ALD) to the Si nanodome structures, both optical and electrical performances are greatly improved. The reflectivity of less than 3% over the wavelength range of from 200 nm to 2000 nm at an incident angle from 0° to 45° is achieved when the Al2O3 film is 90 nm thick. The ultimate efficiency of around 27% is obtained on the CND textured 2 μm-thick Si solar cells, which is compared to the efficiency of around 25.75% and 15% for the 2 μm-thick Si nanodome surface-decorated and planar samples respectively. Electrical characterization was made by using CND-decorated MOS devices to measure device's leakage current and capacitance dispersion. It is found the electrical performance is sensitive to the thickness of the Al2O3 film, and the performance is remarkably improved when the dielectric layer thickness is 90 nm thick. The leakage current, which is less than 4x10-9 A/cm2 over voltage range of from -3 V to 3 V, is reduced by several orders of magnitude. C-V measurements also shows as small as 0.3% of variation in the capacitance over the frequency range from 10 kHz to 500 kHz, which is a strong indication of surface states being fully passivated. TEM examination of CND-decorated samples also reveals the occurrence of SiOx layer formed between the interface of Si and the Al2O3 film, which is thin enough that ensures the presence of field-effect passivation, From our theoretical and experimental study, we believe Al2O3 coated CND structures is a truly viable approach to achieving higher device efficiency.