A High-Efficiency HIT Solar Cell With Pillar Texturing

To investigate the effect of surface texturing for high-efficiency heterojunction with intrinsic thin layer (HIT) solar cells, we have systematically designed different textures and numerically evaluated their ability to trap light. These evaluations were first calibrated by physically fabricating a general pyramid-structured HIT solar cell. The performance of various textures is compared, such as a flat structure, a pillar structure, and different types of pyramid and inverse pyramid structures. Simulation results identify the pillar structure as the best, because the light is reflected several times onto the surface, so that more of the light is trapped by the substrate. The pillar structure HIT solar cell's conversion efficiency of 25.73% is an improvement over the 24.7% of the conventional random pyramid HIT solar cell.