NiO Thin films Deposited by Reactive HiPIMS: From Plasma Diagnostics to Improvement of the Solar Cells Efficiency
November 23, 2015 12:00 am
In this paper we establish the link between the plasma, the properties of the deposited thin films by reactive HIPIMS and the solar cells efficiency. In the first part we have demonstrated that it is easy to transfer from DC to HiPIMS discharge conditions using discharge voltage measurements and optical emission spectroscopy (OES) at different amount of reactive gas. The transition between metallic and poisoned mode is clearly identified in both cases. The second part is dedicated to the characterization of NiO thin films. In DC case, the structure is always columnar and in HiPIMS case the structure is dense and very well crystallized. By photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS), we have found that stoichiometric films are obtained at the beginning of the fully oxidation mode. Finally, we present the characterization of solar cells synthesized with our films, and we conclude to the improvement of these cells using NiO, deposited by HiPIMS, as anode buffer layer (ABL). The lifetime of these cells is 17 times higher and the efficiency about 2.5 times higher than cells without NiO as ABL.