Investigation of Light Trapping from Porous Silicon Surface for the Enhancement of Silicon Solar Cell Performance.

In this work, an innovative porous silicon structure was utilized as an effective antireflective layer for silicon solar cell construction. Silvaco technology computer aided design tools were used to construct the three structures of the porous silicon layers which were no porous, single porous, and double porous. Athena process simulator was used to create the non-porous silicon structure (as control device) and the single porous silicon structure, while the double porous structures were created at the n-type and p-type surfaces of the silicon solar cell by using the device editor (Devedit) tools. The three simulated structures were imported to the Atlas device simulator tools to simulate the current-voltage (I-V) characteristic and the spectral response of the solar cell. The simulation results of the three structures were compared with the fabrication results obtained by Ramizy et al. Finally, the efficiency extracted from the double porous solar cell is 9.55%, the single porous is 9.32%, and the no porous structure exhibited 4.83% efficiency. The double porous silicon solar cell showed an ability to effectively trapping the light collected in the solar cell and thereby improve the efficiency of the solar cell compared to the no porous and the single porous silicon structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]