• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 1999.07d
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• pp.1947-1949
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• 1999

Carrier lifetime in silicon power devices caused switching delay and excessive power loss at high frequency switching. We studied transient turn-on/turn-off transient characteristics of electron irradiated and proton irradiated silicon pn junction diodes. Both the electron and proton irradiation of power devices have already become a widely used practice to reduce minority carrier lifetime locally[1]. The sample is n+p junction diode, made by ion implantation on a $20\Omega.cm$ p-type wafer. We investigated turn-on/turn-off transient & breakdown voltage characteristics by digital oscilloscope. Our data show that proton irradiated samples show better performance than electron irradiated samples.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.120-124
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• 2000

In this paper, the effects of trap distribution on switching characteristis of a lateral insulated gate bipolar transistor (LIGBT) are investigated. The simulations are performed in order to to analyze the effect of the positon, width and concentration of trap distribution model with a reduced minority carrier lifetime using 2D device simulator MEDICI. The turn off time for the proposed LIGBT model A with the trap injection is 0.8$mutextrm{s}$. These results indicate the improvement of about 2 times compared with the conventional LIGBT. It is shown that the trap distribution model is very effective to reduce the turn-off time with a little increasing of on-state voltage drop.

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.4 no.6
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• pp.17-20
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• 2003

This paper describes the effect of halogenic gettering during oxide passivation of commercial solar cell with the $N^{+}$-P-$N^{+}$ structure. In order to study the effect of halogenic gettering on $N^{+}$-P-$N^{+}$ structure mono-crystalline silicon solar cell, we performed conventional POCl$_3$ diffusion for emitter formation and oxide passivation in the presence of HCl vapors. The $N^{+}$-P-$N^{+}$ structure based silicon solar cells were found to have higher short circuit current and minority carrier lifetime. Their performance was also found to be superior than the conventional $N^{+}$-P-$N^{+}$ structure based mono-crystalline silicon solar cell. The cell parameters of the $n^{+}$-p-$p^{+}$ and $n^{+}$-p-$n^{+}$ structure based cells, passivated by HCl assisted oxidation were measured. The improvement in $I_{sc}$ was attributed to the effect of the increased diffusion length of minority carriers, which came from the halogenic gettering effect during the growth of passivating oxide. The presence of chlorine caused gettering of the cells by removing the heavy metals, if any. The other advantage of the presence of chlorine was the removal of the diffusion induced (in oxygen environment) stacking faults and line defects from the surfaces of the silicon wafers. All these effects caused the improvement of the minority carrier lifetime, which in-turn helped to improve the quality of the solar cells.

• Journal of the Korean Vacuum Society
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.225-232
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• 2011

Reactive ion etching (RIE) technique for maskless surface texturing of mc-silicon solar wafers has been applied and succeed in fabricating a grass-like black-silicon with an average reflectance of $4{\pm}1%$ in a wavelength range of 300~1,200 nm. In order to investigate the optimized texturing conditions for mass production of high quantum efficiency solar cell Surface characteristics such as the spatial distribution of average reflectance, micrscopic surface morphology and minority carrier lifetime were monitored for samples from saw-damaged $15.6{\times}15.6\;cm^2$ bare wafer to key-processed wafers as well as the mc-Si solar cells. We observed that RIE textured wafers reveal lower average reflectance along from center to edges by 1% and referred the origin to the non-uniform surface structures with a depth of 2 times deeper and half-maximum width of 3 times. Samples with anti-reflection coating after forming emitter layer also revealed longer minority carrier lifetime by 40% for the edge compared to wafer center due to size effects. As results, mc-Si solar cells with RIE-textured surface also revealed higher efficiency by 2% and better external quantum efficiency by 15% for edge positions with higher height.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.05a
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• pp.431-431
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• 2008

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.38-42
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• 2018

Continuous efforts are being made to improve the efficiency of Si solar cells, which is the prevailing technology at this time. As opposed to the standard front-lit solar cell design, the back-lit design suffers no shading loss because all the metal electrodes are placed on one side close to the pn junction, which is referred to as the front side, and the incoming light enters the denuded back side. In this study, a systematic comparison between the two designs was conducted by means of computer simulation. Medici, a two-dimensional semiconductor device simulation tool, was utilized for this purpose. The $0.6{\mu}m$ wavelength, the peak value for the AM-1.5 illumination, was chosen for the incident photons, and the minority-carrier recombination lifetime (${\tau}$), a key indicator of the Si substrate quality, was the main variable in the simulation on a p-type $150{\mu}m$ thick Si substrate. Qualitatively, minority-carrier recombination affected the short circuit current (Isc) but not the opencircuit voltage (Voc). The latter was most affected by series resistance associated with the electrode locations. Quantitatively, when ${\tau}{\leq}500{\mu}s$, the simulation yielded the solar cell power outputs of $20.7mW{\cdot}cm^{-2}$ and $18.6mW{\cdot}cm^{-2}$, respectively, for the front-lit and back-lit cells, a reasonable 10 % difference. However, when ${\tau}$ < $500{\mu}s$, the difference was 20 % or more, making the back-lit design less than competitive. We concluded that the back-lit design, despite its inherent benefits, is not suitable for a broad range of Si solar cells but may only be applicable in the high-end cells where float-zone (FZ) or magnetic Czochralski (MCZ) Si crystals of the highest quality are used as the substrate.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2010.06a
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• pp.99.2-99.2
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• 2010

This paper investigates the dependence of a-Si:H/c-Si passivation and heterojunction solar cell performances on various cleaning processes of silicon wafer and surface morphology. It is observed that passivation quality of a-Si:H thin-films on c-Si wafer highly depends on wafer surface conditions. The MCLT(Minority carrier life time) of wafer incorporating intrinsic (i) a-Si:H as a passivation layer shows sensitive variation with cleaning process and surface morpholgy. By applying improved cleaning processes and surface morphology we can obtain the MCLT of $200{\mu}sec$ after H-termination and above 1.5msec after i a-Si:H thin film deposition, which has implied open circuit voltage of 0.720V.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.35-40
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• 2015

In this study, an n-ZnO/p-Si heterojunction diode with embedded Ag nanoparticles was fabricated to investigate the possible improvement of light trapping via the surface plasmon resonance effect for solar cell applications. The Ag nanoparticles were fabricated by the physical sputtering method. The acquired current-voltage curves and optical absorption spectra demonstrated that the application of Ag nanoparticles in the n-ZnO/p-Si interface increased the photo current, particularly in specific wavelength regions. The results indicate that the enhancement of the photo current was caused by the surface plasmon resonance effect generated by the Ag nanoparticles. In addition, minority carrier lifetime measurements showed that the recombination losses caused by the Ag nanoparticles were negligible. These results suggest that the embedding of Ag nanoparticles is a powerful method to improve the performance of n-ZnO/p-Si heterojunction solar cells.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.139-143
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• 2017

N-type crystalline silicon solar cells have high metal impurity tolerance and higher minority carrier lifetime that increases conversion efficiency. However, junction quality between the boron diffused layer and the n-type substrate is more important for increased efficiency. In this paper, the current status and prospects for boron diffused layers in N-type crystalline silicon solar cell applications are described. Boron diffused layer formation methods (thermal diffusion and co-diffusion using $a-SiO_X:B$), boron rich layer (BRL) and boron silicate glass (BSG) reactions, and analysis of the effects to improve junction characteristics are discussed. In-situ oxidation is performed to remove the boron rich layer. The oxidation process after diffusion shows a lower B-O peak than before the Oxidation process was changed into $SiO_2$ phase by FTIR and BRL. The $a-SiO_X:B$ layer is deposited by PECVD using $SiH_4$, $B_2H_6$, $H_2$, $CO_2$ gases in N-type wafer and annealed by thermal tube furnace for performing the P+ layer. MCLT (minority carrier lifetime) is improved by increasing $SiH_4$ and $B_2H_6$. When $a-SiO_X:B$ is removed, the Si-O peak decreases and the B-H peak declines a little, but MCLT is improved by hydrogen passivated inactive boron atoms. In this paper, we focused on the boron emitter for N-type crystalline solar cells.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.16-17
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• 2005

Local lifetime control by ion implantation has become an useful tool for production of modern power devices. In this work, punch-through diodes were irradiated with protons for the high speed power diode fabrication. Proton irradiation was executed at the various energy and dose conditions. Characterization of the device was performed by I-V, C-V and Trr measurement. We obtained enhanced reverse recovery time characteristics which was about 45% of original device and about 73% of electron irradiated device. The measurement results showed that proton irradiation was able to effectively reduce minority carrier lifetime.