INFLUENCE OF THE DISLOCATION DENSITY ON THE PERFORMANCE OF HETEROEPITAXIAL INDIUM-PHOSPHIDE SOLAR-CELLS

Heteroepitaxial indium phosphide solar cells developed to date have lo w efficiency due to misfit dislocations. Dislocations act as recombina tion centers and strongly influence the solar cell performance. Calcul ations have been made to study the dependence of heteroepitaxial InP s olar cell efficiency on dislocation density. The effects of surface re combination velocity and cell emitter thickness are also considered. C alculated results are compared with the available experimental results on representative InP solar cells. It is shown that heteroepitaxial I nP cells with over 20% AMO efficiency could be fabricated if dislocati on density can be reduced to < 10(5) cm-2 and the surface recombinatio n velocity reduced to < 10(5) cm/s.