The valence band discontinuity (offset) between a-Si:H-based intrinsic thin layers and c-Si substrates was estimated using ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy (UPS) in combination with x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). A core level shift measured by XPS was utilized to correct the shifts of UPS spectra after UV light illumination. Thin films of a-Si:H, a-SiO:H and a-SiC:H were prepared by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) using SiH4, CO2 and CH4 gases. The valence band offset of 0.11 eV was obtained from the a-Si:H/c-Si heterojunction, whereas 0.27 eV was obtained from the a-SiO:H/c-Si heterojunction. Moreover, the valence band offset between the c-Si and the a-SiC:H deposited with [CH4]=10 SCCM and [CH4]=20 SCCM were determined to be 0.25 eV and 0.36 eV, respectively. The c-Si-based heterojunction solar cells with estimated i layer in this study were fabricated, reduction of FF with increasing the valence band offset was observed. It is likely that increasing of the valence band offset contributes to the reduction of FF.

Progress in microelectronics and semiconductor technology has enable new capabilities in the field of sensor construction, particularly of pH sensors based on field-effect transistors (FETs) as transducers of chemical signal. While crystalline devices present a higher sensitivity, their amorphous counterpart present a much lower fabrication cost, thus enabling the production of cheap disposable sensors for use in the food industry. Interest in biosensors consisting of a semiconductor transducer and a functionalized surface with biomolecule receptors (BioFET) continues to grow as they hold the promise for highly selective, label-free, real-time sensing as an alternative to conventional optical detection techniques. We have been involved in the development of a biosensor where the enzymatic activity of recombinant amidase from Escherichia coli is coupled to a semiconductor transducer for the detection of toxic amides in food and industrial effluents. The devices were fabricated on glass substrates by the PECVD technique in the top gate configuration, where the metallic gate is replaced by an electrolytic solution with an immersed Ag/AgCl reference electrode. Silicon nitride is used as gate dielectric enhancing the sensitivity and passivation layer used to avoid leakage and electrochemical reactions. In this article we report on the semiconductor unit, showing that the sensor displays the desired current-voltage characteristics. In addition we present an electrical model of the device, in agreement with the experimental data, that is sensitive to the pH of the solution.

One-dimensional photonic crystals having desired broad region of high reflectance (R) were fabricated by alternating the deposition of amorphous silicon and amorphous silicon nitride layers. The effect of the deposition temperature and angle of incidence on the optical properties of photonic crystals deposited on glass substrate was determined and an excellent matching was found with the simulated results. The broad region of high R of photonic crystals deposited on flat and textured ZnO:Al substrates decreases when compared to the R of photonic crystals de-posited on glass. The performance of amorphous silicon solar cells with 1-D photonic crystals integrated as the back reflector was evaluated. The external quantum efficiency measurement demonstrated that the solar cells with the photonic crystals back reflector had an enhanced re-sponse in the long wavelength region (above 550 nm) compared to the cells with the Ag reflector.

Hot Wire Chemical Vapor Deposition (HWCVD) is a fast deposition technique with high potential for homogeneous deposition of thin films on large area panels or on continuously moving substrates in an in-line manufacturing system. As there are no high-frequency electromagnetic fields, scaling up is not hampered by finite wavelength effects or the requirement to avoid inhomogeneous electrical fields. Since 1996 we have been investigating the application of the HWCVD process for thin film transistor manufacturing. It already appeared then that these Thin Film Transistors (TFTs) were electronically far more stable than those with Plasma Enhanced (PE) CVD amorphous silicon. Recently, we demonstrated that very compact SiNx layers can be deposited at high deposition rates, up to 7 nm/s. The utilization of source gases in HWCVD of a-Si3N4 films deposited at 3 nm/s is 75 % and 7 % for SiH4 and NH3, respectively. Thin films of stoichiometric a-Si3N4 deposited at this rate have a high mass-density of 3.0 g/cm3. The dielectric properties have been evaluated further in order to establish their suitability for incorporation in TFTs. Now that all TFT layers, namely, the SiNx insulator, the a-Si:H or μc Si:H layers, and the n-type doped thin film silicon can easily be manufactured by HWCVD, the prospect of “all HWCVD” TFTs for active matrix production is within reach. We tested the 3 nm/s SiNx material combined with our protocrystalline Si:H layers deposited at 1 nm/s in ‘all HW’ TFTs. Results show that the TFTs are state of the art with a field-effect mobility of 0.4 cm2/Vs. In order to assess the feasibility of large area deposition we are investigating in-line HWCVD for displays and solar cells.

Sparse arrays of evaporated silver nanodiscs were fabricated with nanosphere lithography (NSL) on glass substrates and on hydrogenated nanocrystalline silicon solar cells. The optical transmittance spectra for arrays on glass vary substantially with film thickness, and were reasonably consistent with previous work. The quantum efficiency spectra of hydrogenated nanocrystalline silicon solar cells show spectral shifts due to coupling of surface plasmons in the metal nanodiscs to the planar waveguide modes of the cells, with overall photocurrent enhancement up to 10%.

A polycrystalline silicon (pc-Si) thin film with large grains on a low-cost non-Si substrate is a promising material for thin-film solar cells. One possibility to grow such a pc-Si layer is by aluminum-induced crystallization (AIC) followed by epitaxial thickening. The best cell efficiency we have achieved so far with such an AIC approach is 8%. The main factor that limits the efficiency of our pc-Si solar cells at present is the presence of many intra-grain defects. These intra-grain defects originate within the AIC seed layer. The defect density of the layers can be determined by chemical defect etching. This technique is well suited for our epitaxial layers but relatively hard to execute directly on the seed layers. This paper presents a way to reveal the defects present in thin and highly-aluminum-doped AIC seed layers by using defect etching. We used diluted Schimmel and diluted Wright etching solutions. SEM pictures show the presence of intra-grain defects and grain boundaries in seed layers after defect etching, as verified by EBSD analyses. The SEM images of diluted Wright etched pc-Si seed layer shows that grain boundaries become much better visible than with diluted Schimmel etch.

One of the primary challenges in the application of hydrogenated microcrystalline silicon (μc-Si:H) to photovoltaic cells is achieving high growth rates while maintaining good material quality over a wide process window. The rapid characterization of the material without generating a complete cell is thus a useful tool to determine said process window. Infrared absorption due to the various vibrational modes of the material has been used as a coarse tool towards this purpose, but the use of FTIR to perform this diagnosis limits the substrates upon which the analysis can be performed. We report on the use of high wave-number (1800-2200 cm-1) Raman scattering to perform a similar role of telltale peak detection directly on solar cells and on substrates suitable for thin-film photovoltaics. We evaluate material grown from SiF4 by RF-PECVD and from SiH4 by Matrix Distributed Electron Cyclotron Resonance (MDECR-) PECVD.

Hydrogenated nano-crystalline silicon (nc-Si:H) is a promising material for multi-junction solar cells. We investigated the local hydrogen environments in nano-crystalline silicon thin films by nuclear-magnetic-resonance (NMR). At room temperature, 1H NMR spectra have broader components than those observed in standard device grade hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H). As the temperature decreases, the 1H NMR exhibits a broadening of the line shape attributed to hydrogen atoms at the interfaces between the amorphous silicon (a-Si) and the crystalline silicon (c-Si) regions. These results suggest that the local hydrogen structure in nc-Si:H is very different from that in a-Si:H. In particular, the hydrogen clusters contributing to broadened spectra may exist on the surfaces of the a-Si/c-Si interfaces which do not exist in the more dense matrix of a-Si:H and may contribute to certain unique optoelectronic properties of these nc-Si:H thin films. The dependence of the spin-lattice relaxation time (T1) on temperature, however, is very similar to that in a-Si:H, which indicates the spin-lattice relaxation mechanism, i.e via spin diffusion through molecular hydrogen, is common to both systems.

Light trapping in microcrystalline silicon thin-film solar cells with integrated lamellar gratings was investigated. The influence of the grating dimensions on the short circuit current and quantum efficiency was investigated by numerical simulation of Maxwell’s equations by a Finite Difference Time Domain approach. For the red and infrared part of the optical spectrum, the grating structure leads to scattering and higher order diffraction resulting in an increased absorption of the incident light in the silicon thin-film solar cell. By studying the diffracted waves arising from lamellar gratings, simple design rules for optimal grating dimensions were derived.

High temperature post-deposition annealing studies were done on hydrogenated amorphous silicon thin films deposited by plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) using the layer-by-layer (LBL) deposition technique. The films were annealed at temperatures of 400 °C, 600 °C, 800 °C and 1000 °C in ambient nitrogen for one hour. Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) depth profiling results showed that high concentration of O atoms were present at the substrate/film interface and at film surface. Very low concentration of O atoms was present separating silicon layers at regular intervals from the film surface and the substrate due to the nature of the LBL deposition and these silicon oxide layers were stable to high annealing temperature. Reflectance spectroscopy measurements showed that the onset of transformation from amorphous to crystalline phase in the LBL a-Si:H film structure started when annealed at temperature of 600 °C but the X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Raman scattering spectroscopy showed that this transition only started at 800 °C. The films were polycrystalline with very small grains when annealed at 800 °C and 1000 °C. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), measurements showed that hydrogen was completely evolved from the film at the on-set of crystallization when annealed at 800 °C. The edge of the reflectance fringes shifted to longer wavelength decrease in hydrogen content but shifted to shorter wavelength with increase in crystallinity.

The efficiencies of hydrogenated polymorphous silicon (pm-Si:H) solar cells have been previously demonstrated to show superior stability under light-soaking. This stability arises due to the fact that the decrease they show in fill factor (FF) is partially offset by an accompanying increase in open circuit voltage (VOC). Recently, high-deposition rate (9Å/s) pm-Si:H material deposited by standard RF-PECVD at 13.56MHz has been investigated as the intrinsic layer in photovoltaic modules as it has shown excellent electronic properties. The degradation behaviour of these high-deposition rate cells, however, differs significantly from that of lower deposition rate material. In particular, no beneficial increase in Voc is observed during light soaking. We investigate the degradation dynamics of solar cells made from this high growth rate material using a Variable Illumination Method (VIM) during light soaking to quantify the changes to these high-rate cells during light-soaking and directly contrast them with those of low-rate (1.5Å/s) cells. In particular, we discuss the importance of bulk recombination effects vs interface quality changes, as well as the dynamics of changes in VOC.

In this paper three multilayered architectures based on a-SiC:H with voltage controlled spectral selectivity in the visible spectrum range are analyzed. Multiple simultaneous modulated communication channels (red, green and blue or their polychromatic mixtures) were transmitted together at different frequencies. The combined optical signal was analyzed by reading out the photocurrent signal generated by the devices, under different applied voltages. Results show that the multiplexed signal depends on the device architecture and is balanced by the wavelength and transmission speed of each input channel, keeping the memory of the incoming optical carriers. In the single graded p-i’i-n configuration the device acts mainly as an optical switch while in two stacked p-i’-n-(ITO)-p-i-n configurations, the input channels are selectively tuned by shifting between forward and reverse bias. An electrical model, supported by a numerical simulation gives insight into the device operation.

In this work, we optimized different thin film silicon layers in a single junction p-i-n solar cell at deposition temperature of 150 °C. Using the optimized doped and undoped layers, 0.5 cm2 test cells fabricated both on glass and polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) substrates. The cells show identical open circuit voltages and fill factors, whereas the short circuit current and consequently the efficiency of the cell fabricated on glass is higher than the efficiency of 3.99% of the cell fabricated on PEN substrate.

Atomistic models of amorphous solids enable us to study properties that are difficult to address with experimental methods. We present a study of two amorphous semiconductors with a great technological importance, namely a- Si:H and a-SiN:H. We use first-principles density functional theory (DFT), i.e. the interatomic forces are derived from basic quantum mechanics, as only that provides accurate interactions between the atoms for a wide range of chemical environments (e.g. brought about by composition changes). This type of precision is necessary for obtaining the correct short range order. Our amorphous samples are prepared by a cooling from liquid approach. As DFT calculations are very demanding, typically only short simulations can be carried out. Therefore most studies suffer from a substantial amount of defects, making them less useful for modeling purposes. We varied the cooling rate during the thermalization process and found it has a considerable impact on the quality of the resulting structure. A rate of 0.02 K/fs proves to be sufficient to prepare realistic samples with low defect concentrations. To our knowledge these are the first calculations that are entirely based on first-principles and at the same time are able to produce defect-free samples. Because of the high computational load also the size of the systems has to remain modest. The samples of a-Si:H and a-SiN:H contain 72 and 110 atoms, respectively. To examine the convergence with cells size, we utilize a large cell of a-Si:H with a total of 243 atoms. As we obtain essentially the same structure as with the smaller sample, we conclude that the use of smaller cells is justified. Although creating structures without any defects is important, on the other hand a small number of defects can give valuable information about the structure and electronic properties of defects in a-Si:H and a-SiN:H. In our samples we observe the presence of both the dangling bond (undercoordinated atom) and the floating bond (over-coordinated atom). We relate structural defects to electronic defect states within the band gap. In a-SiN:H the silicon-silicon bonds induce states at the valence and conduction band edges, thus decreasing the band gap energy. This finding is in agreement with measurements of the optical band gap, where increasing the nitrogen content increases the band gap.

In this paper we investigate the carriers mobility enhancement of the n- and p-channel single-grain silicon thin-film transistors (SG-TFTs) by μ-Czochralski process at low-temperature process (< 350 °C). The high laser energy density nearby the ablation phenomenon that completely melts the silicon layer during the crystallization is responsible for high tensile strain and good crystal quality of the silicon grains, which lead carriers mobility enhancement.

Thin film hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) is widely used in photovoltaics. In order to get the best possible performance of the a-Si:H solar cells it is important to optimize the amorphous film and solar cells in terms their parameters such as mobility gap, p-, i- and n-layer doping levels, electron and hole lifetime and their mobilities, resistance of p-, i- and n-layers, contact grid geometry and parameters of the transparent conducting and antireflecting layers, and others. To maximize thin a-Si:H film based solar cell performance we have developed a general numerical formalism of photoconversion, which takes into account all the above parameters for the optimization. Application of the formalism is demonstrated for typical a-Si:H based solar cells before Staebler-Wronski (SW) light soaking effect. This general formalism is not limited to a-Si:H based systems only, and it can be applied to other types of solar cells as well.

In this work, the electrical properties of heavily doped poly-SiGe deposited at temperatures compatible with MEMS integration on top of standard CMOS are reported. The properties studied are resistivity, temperature coefficient of resistance, noise, piezoresistivity, Hall mobility and effective carrier concentration. The obtained results prove the potential of using poly-SiGe as a sensing layer for MEMS-above-CMOS applications.

Polycrystalline silicon (pc-Si) thin films have been synthesized by aluminium induced crystallization (AIC) of amorphous silicon (a-Si) at low temperatures (≤500°C) on flexible metallic substrates for the first time. Different diffusion barrier layers were used to prepare stress free pc-Si films as well as to evaluate the effective barrier against substrate impurity diffusion. The layers of aluminum (Al) and then amorphous silicon with the thickness of 0.27 μm and 0.37 μm were deposited on barrier coated metal sheets by means of an electron beam evaporation and PECVD, respectively. The bi-layers were annealed in a tube furnace at different temperatures (400-500°C) under nitrogen flow for different time periods (1-10hours). The degree of crystallinity of the as-grown layers was monitored by micro-Raman and reflectance spectroscopies. Structure, surface morphology and impurity analysis were carried out by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and EDAX, respectively. The X-ray diffraction measurements were used to determine the orientation of grains. The results show that the AIC films on metal sheets are polycrystalline and the grains oriented in (100) direction preferentially. However, the properties of AIC films are highly sensitive to the surface roughness.

In this paper single and stacked structures that can be used as wavelength selective devices, in the visible range, are analysed. Two terminal heterojunctions ranging from p-ií-n to p-i-n-p-i’-n configurations are studied. Three terminals double staked junctions with transparent contacts in-between are also considered to increase wavelength discrimination. The color discrimination was achieved by ac photocurrent measurement under different externally applied bias. Experimental data on spectral response analysis and current –voltage characteristics are reported. A theoretical analysis and an electrical simulation procedure are performed to support the wavelength selective behaviour. Good agreement between experimental and simulated data was achieved. Results show that in the single p-i-n configuration the device acts mainly as an optical switch while in the double ones, due to the self bias effect, the input channels are selectively tuned by shifting between positive and negative bias. If the internal terminal is used the inter-wavelength cross talk is reduced and the S/N increased.

Phosphorus and Boron doping effects on the microstructure of nanocrystallites in hydrogenated amorphous and nanocrystalline mixed-phase silicon films were investigated using Raman spectroscopy, secondary ion mass spectrometry, cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy, and conductive atomic force microscopy. The characterizations revealed the following observations. First, the mixed-phase Si:H films can be heavily doped in ˜1021/cm3 by adding PH3 and BF3 in the precursor gases. Second, the intrinsic and doped films can be made in a similar crystalline volume fraction by adjusting hydrogen dilution ratio. The hydrogen dilution ratio is much higher for P-doped films than for the intrinsic film with the similar crystallinity. Third, the doping impacts the nanostructures in the films significantly. Nanograins aggregate to form cone-shaped clusters in the intrinsic and B-doped films but isolate and randomly distribute in amorphous tissues in the P-doped films. The cones in the intrinsic and B-doped films are also different. The cone-angle is smaller and the nanograin density is lower in the B-doped films than in the intrinsic films. These P- and B-doping effects on the nanocrystalline formation are interpreted in terms of diffusions of Si-related radicals during the film growth.