Investigation of Optimum Transparent Conductive Oxides (TCOs) for CdS:O/CdTe Thin Film Solar Cells (TFSCs) from Numerical Analysis.

Transparent Conductive Oxides (TCOs) are an increasingly important component of solar cells, where they act as front electrode elements.The structural templates, diffusion barriers and their work function controls the open circuit voltage(Voc). In this paper, various transparent conductive oxide materials have been studied which are used as the front surface contacts of CdS:O/CdTe based thin film solar cells. Various electrical and optical parameters like work function, thickness, temperature etc., of some common transparent conductive oxides materials such as ZnO, FTO, SnO2etc., are studied. The main idea was to find an optimum conductive oxide layer for CdTe solar cell which shows the great potential in thin film area of solar cell. All the analysis was done by using the widely used simulator Analysis of Microelectronic and Photonic Structures (AMPS 1D). It was observed that both SnO2and ZnOshow similar performance under various conditions. Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) has shown the worst performance among them in all conditions. Fluorinated Tin Oxide (FTO) looked promising match for CdTe solar cells in some conditions.