Series interconnected solar cells and solar cells with integrated bypass diode

A solar cell has a photovoltaic output voltage of about 0.5 voltand an output current proportional to cell area. Most present solarcell modules consists of small area cells connected in series to givedesired output voltages. As large area substrates become available,e.g. continuously grown ribbons, the current output of a solar cellmade from a large substrate becomes excessively large so that thesubstrate needs to be chopped up, processed and re-interconnected. Thework in this thesis describes a practical way of forming seriesconnected solar cells (series integrated array) without cutting up alarge substrate.The performance of any solar cell module can be seriously affectedby shadowing of a solar cell in a series connected array. The shadowingcan not only reduce power out of all proportion to the size of theshadow, but can cause a complete module failure. The problem can beovercome by connecting a bypass diode across each solar cell. A methodis described to show the possibility of integrating a bypass diode intothe solar cell structure during fabrication with a cost of one or twoadditional processing steps.Experimental devices were made using the MIS solar cell approachto verify the concepts of the series interconnected solar cell arrayand the integrated bypass diode