Fabrication of Low-cost High-efficiency III-V Multi-junction Solar Cells

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Morgan Solar Inc. (MSI) is a Canadian company specialized in solar energy. They have invented an entirely new approach to the design and manufacture of solar concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) modules. Their low cost CPV technology is a market-disruptive product which is making solar energy less expensive. Their flagship product is the Sun SimbaTM CPV panel. The main component consists of a patented Light-guide Solar Optic (LSO), an ultra-thin solar concentrator, where sun light is guided using total internal reflection to be concentrated above 800x on high performance multi-junction solar cells (MJSCs). These MJSC cells convert over 40% of the sunlight into electricity. One strategy to reduce the overall system cost is to reduce the size of the CPV system, i.e. smaller lenses and MJSCs. The ability to reduce MJSC size to below 1 mm2 facilitates an increase in nominal module efficiency, from 29% to approximately 35% absolute. Shrinking cell sizes in the mm range and below is getting unpractical for industrial fabrication processes used in CPV cell production of larger sizes. Therefore innovative wafer scale approches to fabricate such small cells in a cost effective approach will be developed, specific device improvements will also be studied through III-V device material passivation.