Characterization of CdS thin film in high efficient CdS/CdTe solar cells

Abstract Cadmium sulfide (CdS) thin film is the most commonly used window material for high-efficient cadmium telluride (CdTe) thin-film photovoltaic devices. High-efficient CdS/CdTe solar cells have been developed using ultra-thin CdS films having a thickness of below 0.1 μm. CdS film is deposited on transparent conductive oxide (TCO) film coated glass substrates by the metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) technique, CdTe film is subsequently deposited by the close-spaced sublimation (CSS) technique. Finally, carbon and Ag–In electrodes are fabricated by the screen printing and sintering method. Cell performance depends primarily on the electrical and optical properties of CdS film, and hence we started to develop higher quality CdS film and found out clear differences between high- and low-quality CdS films from various analyses: SEM, AFM, SIMS, TDS and FT–IR. As a result of controlling qualities of CdS films, photovoltaic conversion efficiency of 10.5% has been achieved for a size of 1376 cm 2 of the solar module under air mass (AM) 1.5 conditions by the Japan Quality Assurance Organization (JQA).