Progress of inverted metamorphic III–V solar cell development at Spectrolab

Inverted metamorphic (IMM) solar cells based on III–V materials have the potential to achieve solar conversion efficiencies that are significantly higher than today's state of the art solar cells which are based on the 3-junction GaInP/GaInAs/Ge design. The 3J IMM device architecture based on (Al)GaInP/GaInAs/GaInAs, for example, allows for a higher voltage solar cell by replacing the low bandgap Ge (0.67 eV) from the conventional 3J structure with the higher bandgap (∼1 eV) metamorphic GaInAs. The inverted growth simply allows the lattice-matched junctions (i.e., (Al)GaInP/GaInAs) to be grown first on the growth substrate, thereby minimizing or shielding them from the defects that arise from the metamorphic layers. Spectrolab has demonstrated 30.5% AM0 efficiency based on the 3J IMM cell architecture grown on a Ge substrate, with V
oc
= 2.963V, J
sc
= 16.9 mA/cm
²
, and FF = 82.5%. In addition, 4J IMM cells have been demonstrated with V
oc
of 4.072 V and AM0 efficiency approaching 25%. With additional development, demonstrating 33% AM0 efficiency is expected in the near future. However, the IMM devices demand more complex processing requirements than conventional solar cells, and we demonstrate the capability to fabricate large area solar cells from standard Ge solar cell substrates.