High Performance Computing for the Simulation of Thin-Film Solar Cells

Abstract

To optimize the optical efficiency of silicon thin-film solar cells, the ab-sorption and reflection of sunlight in these solar cells has to be simulated. Since the thickness of the layers of thin-film solar cells is of the size of the wavelength, a rigorous simulation by solving Maxwell's equations is important. However, large geometries of the cells described by atomic force microscope (AFM) data lead to a large computational domain and a large number of grid points in the resulting discretization. To meet the computational amount of such simulations, high perfor-mance computing (HPC) is needed. In this paper, we compare different high perfor-mance implementations of a software for solving Maxwell's equations on different HPC machines. Simulation results for calculating the optical efficiency of thin-film solar cells are presented.