Internal electric field profile in thin film hydrogenated amorphous silicon diodes studied by the transient-null-current method

Conference · Tue Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 1997

OSTI ID:20085556

Han, D; Yeh, C; Wang, K; Wang, Q

The authors demonstrate that the internal field of a thin a-Si:H pin solar cells can be measured using the transient-null-current method. This method was previously developed to measure the internal field profile in a-Si alloy Schottky barrier. The internal electric field profile was determined by measuring the forward-bias voltages that tune the transient photocurrents generated by a pulsed laser at various wavelengths to zero. They adopt the same technique to a-Si:H p-i-n solar cells. In the case of p-i-n structure, they need to consider both space charge contributed by photogenerated carriers and carrier recombination which disturb the internal field. They use two critical conditions to minimize these effects. (1) To limit the contribution of photocarriers to space-charge distribution, the total charge collected is less than 10{sup {minus}10} C per pulse, and a repetition rate 1 Hz is used to ensure that the diode remains close to its equilibrium state, (2) The measuring time window is about 1--6 {micro}s following the displacement current. Typically the RC constant of diode is <1 {micro}s and the rise time of the forward-bias recombination current is 6.0 x {micro}s. They apply the signal average to process the forward-bias voltage. The error is within {+-}0.05 V. With this technique they can study the effect of variety of structure design or processing on the device performance.

• Research Organization: Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC (US)
• Sponsoring Organization: US Department of Energy
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-83CH10093
• OSTI ID: 20085556
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

14 SOLAR ENERGY
AMORPHOUS STATE
DESIGN
DIAGNOSTIC TECHNIQUES
ELECTRIC FIELDS
FABRICATION
HYDROGEN ADDITIONS
PERFORMANCE
SCHOTTKY BARRIER SOLAR CELLS
SILICON SOLAR CELLS