Investigation of Sputtered P-Type Electrical Contacts for Thin Film Cadmium Telluride-Based Solar Cells

The PV device structure has evolved significantly over the past few years and efficiencies have improved from
$\sim 11\%$
to
$>20\%$
. While the semiconductor layers and thin film growth processes at CSU are well established and documented, the p-type electrical contact has been fabricated by painting carbon (C) and nickel (Ni) conductive paint. This introduces significant variability due to many reasons, including human factors. The presented study aims to replace this traditional electrode deposition method with a sputtered method. The effect of ambient exposure as well as variation with different thicknesses and deposition rates are also being investigated.