A Comparative Study between Silicon Germanium and Germanium Solar Cells by Numerical Simulation

This paper presents the performance between silicon germanium (SiGe) and crystalline germanium (Ge) solar cells in terms of their simulated open circuit voltage, short circuit current density, fill factor and efficiency. The PC1D solar cell modeling software has been used to simulate and analyze the performance for both solar cells, and the total thickness is limited to 1μm of both SiGe and Ge solar cells. The Si0.1Ge0.9 thickness is varied from 10nm to 100nm to examine the effect of Si0.1Ge0.9 thickness on SiGe solar cell. The result of simulation exhibits the SiGe solar cell give a better performance compared to Ge solar cell. The efficiency of 9.74% (VOC = 0.48V, JSC = 27.86mA/cm2, FF =0.73) is achieved with Si0.1Ge0.9 layer of 0.1μm in thickness whilst 2.73% (VOC = 0.20V, JSC = 27.31mA/cm2, FF =0.50) efficiency is obtained from Ge solar cell.