High beginning-of-life efficiency p/n InP solar cells

The high electrical conversion performance and radiation resistance of InP solar cells was discovered during the last decade, The combination of these two characteristics makes InP a very attractive material for space solar cells, To dare, the best performance results for both homo-epitaxial and hetero-epitaxial InP solar cells were achieved using an n/p configuration, The pin configuration is desirable for hetero-epitaxial growth on inexpensive, strong, lightweight group IV substrates such as Si and Ge, Furthermore , diffused-junction pin cells demonstrated a higher radiation resistance than the n/p configuration cells; however, the testing of the pin configuration was limited to lower quality cells as judged by their beginning-of-life (BOL) efficiencies. We have succeeded in developing pin configuration homo-epitaxy InP solar. cells with BOL efficiency values exceeding 17.6% tested under air mass zero (AMO) conditions, The high efficiency values obtained from our cells resulted from improved emitter performance, which was due to better control of the growth of Zn-doped p-type InP. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.