Semiconductors, crystalline silicon

Commercially available PV systems most often include modules made from single-crystal or poly-ciystalline silicon or from thin layers of amoiphous (non-crystalline) silicon. The thin-filni modules use considerably less semiconductor material but have lower efficiencies for converting sunlight to direct-current electricity. Cells and modules made from other thin-filni PV materials such as coppcr-indiuni-diselenide and cadmium telluride are under active development and are beginning to enter the market. 

The thickness of a photovoltaic cell is chosen on the basis of its ability to absorb sunlight, which in turn depends on the bandgap and absorption coefficient of the semiconductor. For instance, 5 nm of crystalline silicon are required to absorb the same amount of sunlight as 0.1 nm of amorphous silicon and 0.01 nm of copper-indium diselenide. Only MBE and MOCVD are capable of producing such extremely thin films.i l... 

We now turn to the issue of physical accuracy. Just as accuracy should not be considered as a single topic, physical accuracy is too vague of an idea to be coherently considered. It is much better to ask how accurate the predictions of DFT are for a specific property of interest. This approach recognizes that DFT results may be quite accurate for some physical properties but relatively inaccurate for other physical properties of the same material. To give just one example, plane-wave DFT calculations accurately predict the geometry of crystalline silicon and correctly classify this material as a semiconductor,... 

Various inorganic semiconductors (p-type and/or n-type nonoxide semiconducting materials) sucb as amorphous or crystalline silicon (a-Si or c-Si), gallium arsenide (GaAs), cadmium telluride (CdTe), gallium phosphide (GaP), indium phosphide (InP), copper... 

While silicon is not the ideal solar cell material, it currently dominates the solar PV market due to its prevalence in the microelectronics industry. Crystalline silicon (c-Si) is an inorganic semiconductor, in which the valence-band maximum and conduction-band minimum are not directly aligned in Uspace, making c-Si an indirect bandgap material. The indirect nature of the bandgap in c-Si means that a considerable change in momentum is required for the promotion of an electron from... 

There are applications that involve crystalline semiconductors in which the properties of a-Si H can be used to great advantage in improving the performance of already well-known crystalline devices. In addition, new structures are possible that would not be readily achieved with crystalline silicon (c-Si). 

One of the most widely used materials for the fabrication of modern VLSI circuits is polycrystalline silicon, commonly referred to as polysilicon. It is used for the gate electrode in metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) devices, for the fabrication of high value resistors, for diffusion sources to form shallow junctions, for conduction lines, and for ensuring ohmic contact between crystalline silicon substrates and overlying metallization structures. 

---