Capacitance spectroscopy in hydrogenated amorphous silicon Schottky diodes and high efficiency silicon heterojunction solar cells

In this thesis, research on a-Si:H Schottky diodes and a-Si:H/c-Si heterojunctions is presented with the focus on the capacitance spectroscopy and information on electronic properties that can be derived from this technique. Last years a-Si:H/c-Si heterojunctions (HJ) have received growing attention as an approach which combines wafer and thin film technologies due to their low material consumption and low temperature processing. HJ solar cells benefit from lower fabrication temperatures thus reduced costs, possibilities of large-scale deposition, better temperature coefficient and lower silicon consumption. The most recent record efficiency belongs to Panasonic with 24.7% for a cell of 100 cm² was obtained. The aim of this thesis is to provide a critical study of the capacitance spectroscopy as a technique that can provide information on both subjects: DOS in a-Si:H and band offset values in a-Si:H/c-Si heterojunctions.The first part of the manuscript is devoted to capacitance spectroscopy in a-Si:H Schottky diodes. The interest is concentrated on the simplified treatment of the temperature and frequency dependence of the capacitance that allows one to extract the density of states at the Fermi level in a-Si:H. We focus on the study of the reliability and validity of this approach applied to a-Si:H Schottky barriers with various magnitudes and shapes of the DOS. Several structures representing n-type and undoped hydrogenated amorphous silicon Schottky diodes are modeled with the help of numerical simulation softwares. We show that the reliability of the studied treatment drastically depends on the approximations used to obtain the explicit analytical expression of the capacitance in such an amorphous semiconductor.In the second part of the chapter, we study the possibility of fitting experimental capacitance data by numerical calculations with the input a-Si:H parameters obtained from other experimental techniques. We conclude that the simplified treatment of the experimentally obtained capacitance data together with numerical modeling can be a valuable tool to assess some important parameters of the material if one considers the results of numerical modeling and performs some adjustments. The second part is dedicated to capacitance spectroscopy of a-Si:H/c-Si heterojunctions with special emphasis on the influence of a strong inversion layer in c-Si at the interface. Firstly, we focus on the study of the frequency dependent low temperature range of capacitance-temperature dependencies of a-Si:H/c-Si heterojunctions. The theoretical analysis of the capacitance steps in calculated capacitance-temperature dependencies is presented by means of numerical modeling. It is shown that two steps can occur in the low temperature range, one being attributed to the activation of the response of the gap states in a-Si:H to the small signal modulation, the other one being related to the response of holes in the strong inversion layer in c-Si at the interface. The experimental behavior of C-T curves is discussed. The quasi-static regime of the capacitance is studied as well. We show that the depletion approximation fails to reproduce the experimental data obtained for (p) a-Si:H/(n) c-Si heterojunctions. Due to the existence of the strong inversion layer, the depletion approximation overestimates the potential drop in the depleted region in crystalline silicon and thus underestimates the capacitance and its increase with temperature. A complete analytical calculation of the heterojunction capacitance taking into account the hole inversion layer is developed. It is shown that within the complete analytical approach the inversion layer brings significant changes to the capacitance for large values of the valence band offset. The experimentally obtained C-T curves show a good agreement with the complete analytical calculation and the presence of the inversion layer in the studied samples is thus confirmed.