Electrochemical Synthesis of Compound Semiconductor Photovoltaic Materials

As one of the non-vacuum, low temperature fabrication route, electrochemical synthesis has been focused for pursuing the cost-effective pathway to produce high efficiency photovoltaic devices. Especially the availability to form the thin film structure on flexible substrate would be the great advantage of electrochemical process. The successful synthesis of the most favorable absorber materials such as CdTe and CIGS has been reported by many researchers, however, the efficiency of electrochemically synthesized could not exceed that from vacuum process, because of microstructural controllability and compositional variation on devices. In this study, we represent the effect of process parameters on the microstructure and composition of compound semiconductor during the synthesis, and propose the photovoltaic characteristics of electrochemically synthesized solar cells.