Investigation of light trapping mechanism of Silicon solar cell performance utilizing Silvaco TCAD

Abstract

In this project, an investigation on the effect of difference shapes of the top surface silicon (Si) solar cell as an antireflective (AR) layer was carried out. Texturing the top surface of silicon solar cell helps to reduce light reflection from the solar cell. The different surface texturing which is planar structure, columnar structure and pyramid structure was created and simulated using Athena process simulator by SILVACO TCAD tools. The structures were then loaded into ATLAS device simulator to extract the electrical performance parameters of the solar cell. The results showed that the planar, pyramid and columnar structures of the Si solar cells exhibited efficiency of 2.04%, 2.18% and 2.39% respectively. The short circuit current, Isc, open circuit voltage, Voc and the maximum power, Pmax for the columnar structures are 2.35444 nA, 0.366605 V and 0.630363 nW respectively. The columnar structures exhibited better performances compared to the other structures indicating the columnar structure is good in trapping the light and efficiently collecting the current carrier at the electrode.