Organic photovoltaic cells using low sheet resistance of ITO for large-area applications

Organic photovoltaic (OPV)cells have attracted considerable attention due to their potential for flexible, lightweight, and low-cost application of solar energy conversion. Since a 1% power conversion efficiency (PCE) OPV based on a single donor-acceptor heterojunction was reported by Tang, the PCE has steadily improved around 5%. It is well known that a high parallel (shunt)resistance and a low series resistance are required simultaneously to achieve ideal photovoltaic devices. The device should be free of leakage current through the device to maximize the parallel resistance. The series resistance is attributed to the ohmic loss in the whole device, which includes the bulk resistance and the contact resistance. The bulk resistance originated from the bulk resistance of the organic layer and the electrodes; the contact resistance comes from the interface between the electrodes and the active layer. Furthermore, it has been reported that the bulk resistance of the indium tin oxide (ITO) of the devices dominates the series resistance of OPVs for a large area more than $0.01\;cm^2$. Therefore, in practical application, the large area of ITO may significantly reduce the device performance. In this work, we investigated the effect of sheet resistance ($R_{sh}$) of deposited ITO on the performance of OPVs. It was found that the device performance of polythiophene-fullerene (P3HT:PCBM) bulk heterojunction OPVs was critically dependent on Rsh of the ITO electrode. With decreasing $R_{sh}$ of the ITO from 39 to $8.5\;{\Omega}/{\square}$, the fill factor (FF) of OPVs was dramatically improved from 0.407 to 0.580, resulting in improvement of PCE from $1.63{\pm}0.2$ to $2.5{\pm}0.1%$ underan AM1.5 simulated solar intensity of $100\;mW/cm^2$.