DEVELOPMENT OF CHARACTERIZATION AND MODELLING TECHNIQUES TO QUANTIFY PROPERTIES AND PERFORMANCE OF DOPED LAYERS IN SILICON SOLAR CELLS

Abstract

In this era of rapidly increasing energy demands and aggravating environ-mental issues, the role of renewable energy resources is substantial. Among all renewable sources, photovoltaics is growing exponentially with advancing solar cell technologies and dropping module prices. Doped layer formation is very critical in the fabrication of solar cells and proper characterization and optimization of the doped layers can lead to significant cell efficiency gains and cost reduction. In this thesis, the use of infrared spectroscopy to characterize doped layers accurately and quickly is analyzed. An optical model which combines ray tracing and effective medium approximation techniques, which explains the infrared reflectance and transmittance characteristics of textured as well as planar samples, is developed and is used to infer doped layer properties using multivariate analysis for advanced process control. This is further extended by applying these doped layer parameters in solar cell simulations to optimize the device performance.