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Silicon solar cells dominate the photovoltaic market today but the technology approaches the theoretical maximum efficiency that can be achieved with silicon as the only absorber material. Tandem solar cells, on the other hand, combine several absorber materials, enabling a better energetic use of the solar irradiance spectrum. Due to their higher efficiency potential, tandem solar cells have a promising future. After intensive research, scientists at Fraunhofer ISE in cooperation with partners have achieved a new efficiency record of 22.3 percent for a multi-junction solar cell made of silicon and III-V semiconductor materials. The outstanding achievement is that the III-V layers were directly grown on the silicon.

Combining the Best Materials

By combining different semiconductor materials, solar cell researchers are attempting to surpass the theoretical efficiency limit of 29.4 percent for a single-junction silicon solar cell, and convert sunlight into electricity even more efficiently. Promising is the combination of silicon material with III-V semiconductor compounds like gallium arsenide. To realize this, one approach is to first deposit the III-V solar cell structures on gallium arsenide substrates, then transfer to a silicon solar cell using semiconductor bonding technology and lastly etch away the gallium-arsenide substrate.  Another less costly approach, however, is to directly grow the III-V layers on the silicon solar cell. In this second approach, the atomic structure must be controlled extremely well during growth so that the gallium and phosphorous atoms arrange on the correct lattice sites at the interface to the silicon material. Also, the distance between the atoms in the crystal lattice must be increased in order to produce the gallium arsenide material. Researchers have been working on these challenges for over ten years. Now they have been able to greatly reduce the defect density in the III-V semiconductor layers on the silicon and have successfully produced a III-V/Si tandem solar cell with a new efficiency record of 22.3 percent using this direct-growth approach. The efficiency value was published in the internationally recognized table of the best research-cell efficiencies worldwide on December 25, 2018.