Implied-V(oc) and Suns-V(oc) Measurements in Multicrystalline Solar Cells

Presented at the 29th IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference; New Orleans, Louisiana; May 17-24, 2002. ©2002 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.Identifying loss mechanisms and predicting device performance are key goals of device and process characterization. Photoconductance measurements allow the extraction of the Implied V(oc) and Suns V(oc), which together can be used for process monitoring, for loss analysis and to identify the potential device performance in the absence of unwanted defects. In this paper, we measure the Implied V(oc) and Suns V(oc) from solar cells with a range of different substrates and at different stages in processing. These measurements are used to analyze the correlation with the actual V(oc) to determine the impact of both non-idealities such as depletion region recombination, and expected effects such as lifetime changes, both during processing and in the final devices