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Competitive advantage
- World-leading expertise in silicon solar cells
- Unique knowledge of Passivated Emitter Rear Local diffusion (PERL) and related silicon solar cell designs and processing requirements
- Expertise in the preparation of silicon structure for III-V growth processes preserving silicon performance
- Patented room temperature contacting technique to simplify processing
- Design and optimisation capability for silicon sub-cells including detailed device modelling, and expertise in additive optical path length enhancement techniques
Impact
- First group to investigate the design requirements for a silicon solar cell with grown III-V material as top junction
- Part of team that holds the current two junction III-V/silicon multi-junction world record for one sun illumination
Successful applications
- Successfully determined robust process for preserving silicon minority carrier lifetimes during III-V growth
- Used modelling and experimental work to determine the key device features to ensure high performance silicon sub-cells
- Produced the first III-V/silicon multi-junction solar cells with optical path length enhancement schemes integrated
Capabilities and facilities
- Full silicon solar cell processing capability including emitter and back surface diffusions, controlled surface texturing and advanced metallisation
- Additive optical path length enhancement techniques developed at UNSW
- Multi-junction solar cell characterisation including spectral response
Our partners
- SolAero, USA