Semiconductor Materials and

Processing
6. Semiconductors in Emerging
Applications

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 6. Semiconductors in Emerging Applications

 Applications of Semiconductors:
 Photovoltaics (PV)/Solar cells

 Solid State Lighting (SSL)

 An organic light-emitting diode (OLED or organic LED), etc.

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 Photovoltaics (PV)
• It is the conversion of sunlight into electricity using
semiconducting materials that exhibit the photovoltaic effect.

• A phenomenon studied in physics, photochemistry, and

electrochemistry.

• The photovoltaic effect is commercially utilized for electricity

generation and as photosensors.

• Help to mitigate global warming caused by CO2.

• A photovoltaic system employs solar modules, each

comprising a number of solar cells, which generate electrical
power.

• PV installations may be ground-mounted, rooftop-mounted,

wall-mounted or floating.

• The mount may be fixed or use a solar tracker to follow the

sun across the sky.
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• Solar PV has specific advantages as an energy source:

 once installed, its operation generates no pollution and no greenhouse gas

emissions

 Simple scalability in respect of power needs

 Silicon has large availability in the Earth's crust, although other materials
required in PV system manufacture such as silver will eventually constrain
further growth in the technology.

• Disadvantages

 The use of PV as a main source requires energy storage systems or global

distribution by high-voltage direct current power lines causing additional costs

 Unstable power generation

 The requirement for power companies to compensate for too much solar
power in the supply mix by having more reliable conventional power supplies
in order to regulate demand peaks and potential undersupply.
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 Solar cells

 The solar cell is an important candidate for an alternative energy

source because it converts sunlight directly to electricity with:

• good conversion efficiency,

• provides nearly permanent power at low operating cost,

• and is virtually nonpolluting.

 A solar cell is a pn junction device with no voltage directly applied

across the junction.

 These devices have long been used for the power supply of
satellites and space vehicles.

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 How Solar Cells Work
p - + n
hv > Eg - +
- +
- +
- +

 Photons in sunlight hit the solar panel and are absorbed by semiconducting materials to
create electron hole pairs.
 Electrons (negatively charged) are knocked loose from their atoms, allowing them to flow
through the material to produce electricity.
 First Generation – Single Junction Silicon Cells

89.6% of 2007 Production

45.2% Single Crystal Si
42.2% Multi-crystal SI

• Limit efficiency 31%

• Single crystal silicon - 16-19%
efficiency Silicon Cell Average Efficiency
• Multi-crystal silicon - 14-15%
efficiency
• Best efficiency by Sun Power Inc 22%
 Second Generation – Thin Film Cells

CdTe 4.7% & CIGS 0.5% of 2007 Production

• New materials and processes to improve
efficiency and reduce cost.

• Thin film cells use about 1% of the expensive

semiconductors compared to First Generation
cells.

• CdTe – 8 – 11% efficiency (18%

demonstrated)

• CIGS – 7-11% efficiency (20% demonstrated)

 Third Generation – Multi-junction Cells

• Enhance poor electrical performance while maintaining very low

production costs.
• Current research is targeting conversion efficiencies of 30-60% while
retaining low cost materials and manufacturing techniques.
• Multi-junction cells – 30% efficiency (40-43% demonstrated)
 8.1. The pn Junction Solar Cell
 Consider the pn junction shown in Fig. below with a resistive load.
Even with zero bias applied to the junction, an electric field exists
in the space charge.
 Incident photon illumination can create electron–hole pairs in the
space charge region that will be swept out producing the
photocurrent IL in the reverse-biased direction.

A pn junction solar cell with resistive load.

 The photocurrent IL produces a voltage drop across the
resistive load which forward biases the pn junction.
 The forward-bias voltage produces a forward-bias current
IF
 The net pn junction current, in the reverse-biased direction,
is:

 There are two limiting cases of interest. The short-circuit

condition occurs when R = 0 so that V= 0.
 The current in this case is referred to as the short-circuit
current, or
• The second limiting case is the open-circuit condition and
occurs when R →∞
• The net current is zero and the voltage produced is the
open-circuit voltage.
• The photocurrent is just balanced by the forward-biased
junction current,

We can find the open circuit voltage Voc as:

I–V characteristics of a pn junction solar

cell.
• The power delivered to the load is

We may find the current and voltage which will deliver the maximum
power to the load by setting the derivative equal to zero, or dP/dV =0.

where Vm is the voltage that produces the maximum

power. We may rewrite the above Equation in the form
• The Fig. shows the maximum power rectangle where Im is
the current when V =Vm

Maximum power rectangle of the solar cell I–V characteristics

 8.2. Conversion Efficiency and Solar Concentration

 The conversion efficiency of a solar cell is defined as the

ratio of output electrical power to incident optical power.
 For the maximum power output, we can write:

 The maximum possible current and the maximum

possible voltage in the solar cell are Isc and Voc,
respectively.
 The ratio ImVm/IscVoc is called the fill factor and is a
measure of the realizable power from a solar cell.
 Typically, the fill factor is between 0.7 and 0.8
 The Impact of Band Gap on Efficiency

hv > Eg

• Efficiency,  = (VocIscFF)/Pin
• Decrease Eg, absorb more of the spectrum
8.3. Nonuniform Absorption Effects

Absorption coefficient as a function of

wavelength for several semiconductors.
• As the absorption coefficient increases, more photon energy
will be absorbed near the surface than deeper into the
semiconductor.
• In this case, then, we will not have uniform excess carrier
generation in a solar cell.
• The number of photons absorbed as a function of distance x
from the surface can be written as:
φ0 is the incident photon flux (cm -2 s-1) on
the surface of the semiconductor.

• We can also take into account the reflection of photons from

the surface.
• Let R(ʎ) be the fraction of photons that are reflected.
• If we assume that each photon absorbed creates one electron–
hole pair, then the generation rate of electron–hole pairs as a
function of distance x from the surface is:
 8.4. The Heterojunction Solar Cell

• A heterojunction is formed between two

semiconductors with different bandgap energies.
 8.5. Amorphous Silicon Solar Cells

• Based on the types of crystal used, soar cells can be

classified as,
1. Monocrystalline silicon cells
2. Polycrystalline silicon cells
3. Amorphous silicon cells
1. The Monocrystalline silicon cell is produced from pure
silicon (single crystal). Since the Monocrystalline silicon
is pure and defect free, the efficiency of cell will be
higher.
2. In polycrystalline solar cell, liquid silicon is used as raw
material and polycrystalline silicon was obtained followed
by solidification process. The materials contain various
crystalline sizes. Hence, the efficiency of this type of cell
is less than Monocrystalline cell.
3. Amorphous silicon was obtained by depositing
silicon film on the substrate like glass plate.
The layer thickness amounts to less than 1µm – the
thickness of a human hair for comparison is 50-100
µm.
The efficiency of amorphous cells is much lower.
As a result, they are used mainly in low power
equipment, such as watches and pocket calculators.
The amorphous silicon is deposited on an optically
transparent indium tin oxide–coated glass substrate.
 Comparison of Types of solar cell

Material Efficiency (%)

Monocrystalline silicon 14-17

Polycrystalline silicon 13-15

Amorphous silicon 5-7

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Advantage, disadvantage and application of Solar cell

 Advantage
 It is clean and non-polluting
 It is a renewable energy
 Solar cells do not produce noise and they are totally
silent.
 They require very little maintenance
 They are long lasting sources of energy which can be
used almost anywhere
 They have long life time
 There are no fuel costs or fuel supply problems

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• Disadvantage
 Soar power can be obtained in night time
 Soar cells (or) solar panels are very expensive
 Energy has not be stored in batteries
 Air pollution and whether can affect the production of
electricity
 They need large are of land to produce more efficient
power supply

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• Applications

Solar pumps are used for water supply.

Domestic power supply for appliances include
refrigeration, washing machine, television and lighting
Ocean navigation aids: Number of lighthouses and most
buoys are powered by solar cells
Telecommunication systems: radio transceivers on
mountain tops, or telephone boxes in the country can
often be solar powered
Electric power generation in space: To providing
electrical power to satellites in an orbit around the Earth

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 Solid State Lighting (SSL)
• Solid State Lighting (SSL) is one of the prominent light sources for future lighting
applications with benefits such as

 high energy savings,

 long lifetimes

 high efficiency

• The main drawback in solid state lighting system is that

 the total initial cost of the system is high for large scale production.

 Packaging and electronics components in the system account to about 60% of the total
cost.

• Si based wafer level packaging offers great advantages for large scale cheap production.

• it also helps to create to create miniaturized and multifunctional system with integrated
electronics with LEDs.
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 Organic light-emitting diode (OLED)
• An organic light-emitting diode (OLED or organic LED), also
known as organic electroluminescent (organic EL) diode, is a
light-emitting diode (LED) in which the emissive
electroluminescent layer is a film of organic compound that
emits light in response to an electric current.

• This organic layer is situated between two electrodes;

typically, at least one of these electrodes is transparent.

• OLEDs are used to create digital displays in devices such as

television screens, computer monitors, and portable
systems such as smartphones and handheld game consoles.

• The development of white OLED devices for use in solid-

state lighting applications.
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• There are two main families of OLED:

 those based on small molecules

 those employing polymers.

• Adding mobile ions to an OLED creates a light-emitting electrochemical cell (LEC)

which has a slightly different mode of operation.

• An OLED display can be driven with a passive-matrix (PMOLED) or active-matrix

(AMOLED) control scheme.

• In the PMOLED scheme, each row (and line) in the display is controlled
sequentially, one by one,

• whereas AMOLED control uses a thin-film transistor (TFT) backplane to directly

access and switch each individual pixel on or off, allowing for higher resolution
and larger display sizes.

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• Although its name looks similar, the OLED is fundamentally
different from its cousin the LED.

• The LED is based on a p-n diode structure.

• In an LED, doping is used to create p- and n- regions by changing

the conductivity of the host semiconductor.

• OLEDs do not employ a p-n structure.

• Doping of OLEDs is used to increase radiative efficiency by direct

modification of the quantum-mechanical optical recombination
rate.

• Doping is additionally used to determine the wavelength of

photon emission.
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• An OLED display works without a backlight because it emits visible light.

• Thus, it can display deep black levels and can be thinner and lighter than a liquid crystal display
(LCD).

• In low ambient light conditions (such as a dark room), an OLED screen can achieve a higher
contrast ratio than an LCD, regardless of whether the LCD uses cold cathode fluorescent lamps or
an LED backlight.

• OLED displays are made in the same way as LCDs, but after TFT (for active matrix displays),
addressable grid (for passive matrix displays) or indium-tin oxide (ITO) segment (for segment
displays) formation, the display is coated with hole injection, transport and blocking layers, as
well with electroluminescent material after the first 2 layers, after which ITO or metal may be
applied again as a cathode and later the entire stack of materials is encapsulated.

• The TFT layer, addressable grid or ITO segments serve as or are connected to the anode, which
may be made of ITO or metal.

• OLEDs can be made flexible and transparent, with transparent displays being used in
smartphones with optical fingerprint scanners and flexible displays being used in foldable
smartphones.
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