Series-Connected and Shade-Resilient Silicon Photovoltaic Module for Direct Laser Powering

We achieve series-connected and shade-resilient silicon photovoltaic (PV) module by connecting Schottky bypass diodes to cascaded PV cells in parallel with a reverse polarity. Localized substrate removal process is conducted to ensure electrical isolation among all on-chip PV and bypass diodes. A concentric pizza-like PV arrangement is employed to minimize the mismatch loss upon direct Gaussian laser beam illumination. The resulting PV module provides an open-circuit voltage of 4.26 V and an electrical power of 1.1 mW. Its output power is still 0.47 mW when half of the PV module is optical shaded. This is a ten-fold improvement as compared to the shading performance of reference PV module without bypass diodes.