Contact formation in gallium arsenide solar cells

Autor: N.S. Fatemi, V. G. Weizer
Rok vydání: 1988
Předmět:
Zdroj: Conference Record of the Twentieth IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference.
DOI: 10.1109/pvsc.1988.105779
Popis: Gold and gold-based alloys, commonly used as solar cell contact materials, are known to react readily with gallium arsenide. Experiments were performed to identify the mechanisms involved in these GaAs-metal interactions. It is shown that the reaction of GaAs with gold takes place via a dissociative diffusion process. It is shown further that the GaAs-metal reaction rate is controlled to a very great extent by the condition of the free surface of the contact metal, an interesting example of which is the previously unexplained increase in the reaction rate that has been observed for samples annealed in a vacuum environment as compared to those annealed in a gaseous ambient. A number of other hard-to-explain observations, such as the low-temperature formation of voids in the gold lattice and crystallite growth on the gold surface, are explained by invoking this mechanism. >
Databáze: OpenAIRE