Technological and economical aspects on the influence of reduced Cu(In,Ga)Se2 thickness and Ga grading for co-evaporated Cu(In,Ga)Se2 modules

Reducing the Cu(In,Ga)Se-2 (CIGS) thickness is one way of improving the throughput and capacity in existing production, provided that the efficiency can be kept at a high level. Our experimental results from an in-line co-evaporation process show that it is possible to produce CIGS solar cells with good efficiency at a CIGS thickness of less than 1 mu m. An efficiency of 14.4% was obtained for an evaporation time of 8 min and a resulting CIGS thickness of only 0.8 mu m. The quantum efficiency measurements show only a minor reduction of the collection in the infrared region that can be related to losses caused by reduced absorption. Passivation of the back contact has been found to be important for thin devices and one way of obtaining good back contact properties, or to reduce the impact of back contact recombination is to use an increased Ga content near the back contact. We have found that Ga grading is feasible also in the three stage process, i.e. a Ga-rich layer near the back contact from stage one is to a high degree retained also after stages two and three. In this paper we discuss the implication of efficiency reduction for the economy of the production and how high efficiency loss that can be tolerated, provided that the output is doubled at equal production cost for the CIGS layer. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.