Design of a Broadband Silver Grating Coupler for Silicon Solar Cells

摘要

In this paper, we investigate the electromagnetic coupling of light into silicon for solar cell applications using plasmonic gratings. This work explores the design of metal grating arrays and their integration with silicon. Silver gratings are modelled using 3D FDTD software from lumerical [1], and optimised to produce highly scattering plasmonic gratings. In this presentation, the effects of changing the periodicity of the silver gratings are explored and related to coupling performance in terms of scattering efficiency. Effects of introducing a spacing layer was observed and analysed; and the ITO spacing layer is taken to be between Onm and 100nm. A desired surface plasmons resonance can be tuned by altering either the gratings periodicity or the spacing layer thickness.