Fabrication and characterization of amorphous ITO/p-Si heterojunction solar cell

Amorphous indium-tin-oxide(a-ITO) film was deposited by radio-frequency(RF) magnetron sputtering at 180°C substrate temperature on the texturized p-Si wafer to fabricate a-ITO/p-Si heterojunction solar cell.The microstructural,optical and electrical properties of the a-ITO film were characterized by XRD,SEM,XPS,UV-VIS spectrophotometer,four-point probe and Hall effect measurement,respectively.The electrical properties of heterojunction were investigated by I-V measurement,which reveals that the heterojunction shows strong rectifying behavior under a dark condition.The ideality factor and the saturation current density of this diode are 2.26 and 1.58×10-4 A cm-2,respectively.And the value of IF/IR(IF and IR stand for forward and reverse currents,respectively) at 1 V is found to be as high as 21.5.For the a-ITO/p-Si heterojunction solar cell,the a-ITO thin film acts not only as an emitter layer,but also as an anti-reflected coating film.The conversion efficiency of the fabricated a-ITO/p-Si heterojunction cell is approximately 1.1%,under 100 mW cm-2 illumination(AM1.5 condition).And the open-circuit voltage(Voc),short-circuit current density(J SC),filll factor(FF) are 280 mV,9.83 mA cm 2 and 39.9%,respectively.Because the ITO film deposited at low temperature is amorphous,it can effectively reduce the interface states between ITO and p-Si.The barrier height and internal electric field,which is near the surface of p-Si,can effectively be enhanced.Thus we can see the great photovoltaic effect.