Approach to liberating solar voltaic structures from the fundamental efficiency-limiting confines of conventional lattice parameter substrates

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This project addresses renewable energy sources, and builds on existing Canadian capability to develop the world's most efficient photovoltaic cells for solar energy systems. Emerging from expertise gathered in Canada's high-tech sector over the past 10-20 years, this project enables two university groups (Université de Sherbrooke and University of Ottawa) to develop their existing collaborations with Canadian-based OSEMI Canada Inc. OSEMI Canada (based in Richmond and Sherbrooke, Québec) designs and produces epitaxy reactors, also providing epitaxy growth supply services to device manufacturers and researchers. The project targets improving the performance towards the 50% mark, so that concentrated photovoltaics systems can deliver significantly more energy per year and lower the system install cost. High efficiency solar cells are presently made by growing very thin semiconductor layers onto expensive substrates, but the cell efficiency is still limited by the confines of allowable mismatch between the crystal properties of the substrate and those of the grown layers. This project aims to overcome this physical and economic limitation by 'engineering' the needed substrate properties in lower cost materials, with improved matching of crystal structure, allowing the use of higher quality alloys better adapted for high efficiency solar cells. Success in this will open the door to greater economies through use of 're-usable substrates' as well as broad potential for more economic manufacture of other semiconductor devices (e.g: power transistors) beyond the immediate need for high efficiency solar cells. The process for making these substrates (recently developed at USherbrooke) patterns nanostructures into the surface of a semiconductor. Researchers working on this project will experience all the steps from device design to manufacture and system testing in an industrial environment, and will emerge from the project activity as highly-sought-after HQP skills in an exciting and expanding market sector (growing at 25%/year). The team plans to use this project to follow on very successful previous and ongoing projects such as the SUNRISE and 4CPV-SPG projects.