Determination of the density of states in heavily doped regions of siliconsolar cells

In highly doped crystalline silicon, the formation of an impurity band subs tantially changes the density of states (DOS) of electrons. As yet, heavily doped silicon has been modelled using solely the ideal DOS of undoped sili con, regardless of the doping density. Since this approximation influences the position of the Fermi energy, we derive a more realistic silicon DOS mo del that is suitable for numerical device simulations. Our new model is bas ed on photoluminescence data reported in the literature acid a recently pub lished bandgap narrowing model. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights r eserved.