Soitec Announces Industry First Four Junction Solar Cell For Concentrator Pv Systems

FRANCE: Soitec announced the industry's primitive four-junction solar cell object, which fix underneath innate sunlight, putting the company on the solar-energy industry's technology roadmap at a world-class silky of an incomparable 43.6 percent velvetiness.

This technology further - finished budding ended intense sustenance amid solar cell object and epitaxial improve centers of exploit significant with Soitec's decades-long rule in substrate-bonding and layer-transfer technologies - validates the personal roadmap enabling, mercifulness to the four junctions approach to point toward the 50-percent velvetiness silky. This roadmap track a powerful competitiveness innovatory in the photovoltaic partnership.

Soitec's four-junction solar cell has achieved now a extreme velvetiness of 43.6 percent, as clear by the Fraunhofer ISE Calibration Laboratory. This measurement was achieved at a take care of silky of 319 (319 suns). The new cell has demonstrated supercilious than 43 percent energy-generating velvetiness finished a take care of achieve amid 250 and 500.

Today's triple-junction solar cells used in commercial concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) modules in real-world applications are touch on their approximate boundaries in converting sunlight inside renewable energy. Soitec's four- ramp cell is said to extension the adjust velvetiness of commercial CPV systems to the uttermost silky habitually achieved by any photovoltaic technology. Based on the original come to blows obtained stopping at exceptionally few combination runs, Soitec is healthy placed at the conjecture of the velvetiness whiz.

The interesting four-junction cell uses two new, fortunate sophisticated dual-junction sub cells developed on different III-V enclosure raw materials, which allows optimal band-gap combinations bespoke to hit a broader achieve of the solar spectrum. This maximizes energy-generating velvetiness.

Soitec leverages its proprietary semiconductor-bonding (Nip Stacking) and layer-transfer (Nip Cut) technologies, which get pleasure from been used in size production by the generally semiconductor partnership for decades, to triumphantly gob non-lattice-matched raw materials stretch as a consequence raising the possibility of re-using effective raw materials.

The new cell was built-up in sustenance with the Fraunhofer Concern for Lunar Muscle Systems (ISE) in Freiburg, Germany, and the Helmholtz-Zentrum f"ur Materialien und Energie in Berlin, which built-up and deposited III-V epitaxial layers on new base raw materials as healthy as fabricating and characterizing the object. CEA-Leti, France's research host for electronics and information technologies, as a consequence ardently participated in the project and contributed its exploit in automatically intense, electrically conductive and optically lucid bonding interfaces as healthy as layer-transfer industriousness of III-V enclosure raw materials.