The investigation of preparation by magnetron sputtering and application in amorphous silicon solar cells of pyramid-like textured ZnO:Al thin film

In this paper, the pyramid-like texture aluminum doped zinc oxide (ZnO:Al) thin films was prepared by adding negative bias voltage and controlling the sputtering parameters properly, and the lowest resistivity of 7.8×10−4 ·cm, light transmittance above 83% was achieved, respectively. Instead of the traditional tin oxide doped with fluorine (SnO2:F), using the ZnO:Al film as a front electrode transparent conducting oxide (TCO) layer for hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) solar cells, the higher contact potential barrier of ZnO:Al /p-a-SiC:H have to be overcome. In this paper, we attempt to resolve the contact potential barrier by inserting a buffer layer of microcrystalline silicon (μc-Si:H) between ZnO:Al layer and p-SiC: H windows layer, and its efficiency increases from 7.6% for the SnO2:F TCO to 8.3% for the ZnO:Al /μc-Si:H TCO.