Gallium Phosphide Integrated with Silicon Heterojunction Solar Cells

It has been a long-standing goal to epitaxially integrate III-V alloys with Si substrates which can enable low-cost microelectronic and optoelectronic systems. Among the III-V alloys, gallium phosphide (GaP) is a strong candidate, especially for solar cells applications. Gallium phosphide with small lattice mismatch (~0.4%) to Si enables coherent/pseudomorphic epitaxial growth with little crystalline defect creation. The band offset between Si and GaP suggests that GaP can function as an electron-selective contact, and it has been theoretically shown that GaP/Si integrated solar cells have the potential to overcome the limitations of common a-Si based heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells.

Despite the promising potential of GaP/Si heterojunction solar cells, there are two main obstacles to realize high performance photovoltaic devices from this structure. First, the growth of the polar material (GaP) on the non-polar material (Si) is a challenge in how to suppress the formation of structural defects, such as anti-phase domains (APD). Further, it is widely observed that the minority-carrier lifetime of the Si substrates is significantly decreased during epitaxially growth of GaP on Si.

In this dissertation, two different GaP growth methods were compared and analyzed, including migration-enhanced epitaxy (MEE) and traditional molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). High quality GaP can be realized on precisely oriented (001) Si substrates by MBE growth, and the investigation of structural defect creation in the GaP/Si epitaxial structures was conducted using high resolution X-ray diffraction (HRXRD) and high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM).

The mechanisms responsible for lifetime degradation were further investigated, and it was found that external fast diffusors are the origin for the degradation. Two practical approaches including the use of both a SiNx diffusion barrier layer and P-diffused layers, to suppress the Si minority-carrier lifetime degradation during GaP epitaxial growth on Si by MBE were proposed. To achieve high performance of GaP/Si solar cells, different GaP/Si structures were designed, fabricated and compared, including GaP as a hetero-emitter, GaP as a heterojunction on the rear side, inserting passivation membrane layers at the GaP/Si interface, and GaP/wet-oxide functioning as a passivation contact. A designed of a-Si free carrier-selective contact MoOx/Si/GaP solar cells demonstrated 14.1% power conversion efficiency.