Solar-Tectic research achieves highly textured c -Si thin-film on buffered soda-lime glass
Solar-Tectic LLC has announced that research it funded has led to a breakthrough technology which will be published in the February 1 2015 edition of the journal Materials Letters.
The title of the paper is "Highly textured silicon [111] crystalline thin-film on buffered soda-lime glass by e-beam evaporation" by Shane McMahon et al. The achievement of depositing a highly textured, aligned or oriented silicon [111] crystalline film opens the door for many new applications in both photovoltaics and displays, for example thin-film transistors (TFTs) used in displays. This is the first time a highly aligned crystalline silicon thin-film has been deposited on inexpensive soda-lime glass, via a completely transparent and cheap buffer layer.
The buffer layer is Magnesium Oxide (MgO) and was reported on separately, earlier this year, in a paper titled "Extremely highly textured MgO [111] crystalline films on soda-lime glass by E-beam" by A. Chaudhari et al. The crystalline silicon film was deposited at low temperature from a eutectic alloy melt using inexpensive aluminium as the metal catalyst. The deposition tool used was the ordinary electron-beam (e-beam). With this achievement an additional silicon layer, possibly single crystalline, can now be deposited epitaxially on the silicon film for added efficiency for various electronic devices. Alternatively, the process reported on can be applied to other semiconductor materials, such as Germanium (Ge) or Gallium Nitride (GaN), depending on the device needed.
