Advanced Opto-electrical Characterization of Solar Cells (Printed Electronics Europe 2013)

Accurate device characterization is essential for research and development of solar cells for any material type or structure. Obtaining reliable material and device parameters is important, since it leads to a better understanding of device operation and the quantification of loss mechanisms.

We present an overview of state-of-the-art experimental techniques and show an approach to extract material and device parameters with a much higher accuracy as exemplified with an organic solar cell. We use analytical and numerical analysis for steady-state and transient experiments to increase the accuracy of the extracted model parameters and to reduce parameter correlation.

Beat Ruhstaller is founder and CEO of Fluxim AG and professor at the Institute of Computational Physics at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. He received his Diploma in Physics from ETH Zurich, a Masters and Ph.D. degree in Physics from the University of California at Santa Cruz, USA, and an Executive MBA from Zurich University of Applied Sciences. During his Ph.D. he developed numerical models for charge transport in organic light-emitting devices in collaboration with the IBM Almaden Research Center, USA. Subsequently he was a postdoctoral researcher at the OLED display technology team at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland. He has performed research on optical, electronic and thermal processes in light-emitting and light-harvesting thin film semiconductor devices for the last 15 years. He has been a principal investigator in several European research projects and has co-organized several international scientific conferences in the field of organic electronics.

Fluxim provides advanced device characterization technology to the OLED display, lighting and photovoltaics community world-wide. The opto-electronic simulation software setfos is as complex as physics necessitates and is still easy-to-use, providing handy least-square fitting and parameter variation routines. Moreover, Fluxim AG has launched a measurement system called paios for the characterization of solar cell and OLED devices. The platform for all-in-one characterization is capable to measure a large variety of dynamic opto-electronic experiments and is dedicated to extract material and device parameters. Fluxim collaborates with leading industries such as Philips and Holst Centre and is partner in several European research projects.