**1. Introduction**

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Photovoltaic is accepted as a promising technology that directly takes advantage of our planet's ultimate source of power, the sun. When exposed to light, solar cells are capable of producing electricity without any harmful effect to the environment or devices. Therefore, they can generate power for many years (at least 20 years) while requiring only minimal maintenance and operational costs. Currently the wide-spread use of photovoltaic over oth‐ er energy sources is impeded by the relatively high cost and low efficiency of solar cells [1].

III-V multi-junction solar cells, as a new technology, offer extremely high efficiencies com‐ pared with traditional solar cells made of a single layer of semiconductor material [2]. The strong demand for higher efficiency photovoltaic has recently attracted considerable interest in multi-junction solar cells based on III-V semiconductors [3]. Depending on a particular technology, multi-junction solar cells are capable of generating approximately twice as much power under the same conditions as traditional solar cells made of silicon. Unfortu‐ nately, multi-junction solar cells are very expensive, so they are mainly used in high per‐ formance applications such as satellites at present. However, in our opinion, with the concentrator technology, the tandem cell will play a role in the future energy market. The state-of-the-art high efficiency III-V solar cells utilize a triple junction structure which con‐ sists of the Ge bottom sub-cell (0.67 eV) formed on the Ge substrate homogeneously, the Ga0.99In0.01As middle sub-cell (1.36 eV), and the lattice matched (LM) Ga0.5In0.5P top sub-cell (1.86 eV) [4,5]. It has reached conversion efficiencies up to 40% at concentrations of hun‐ dreds of suns under the AM1.5D low aerosol optical depth (AOD) spectrum [4]. The GaInP/ GaInAs/Ge triple-junction cells have also been demonstrated with efficiencies up to 30% un‐ der one-sun AM0 spectrum for space applications. Multi-junction solar cells based on III-V materials have achieved the highest efficiencies of any present photovoltaic devices. Addi‐

© 2013 Lin et al.; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2013 Lin et al.; licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

tionally, these devices are the only solar cells currently available with efficiencies above 30%. The high efficiency is due to the reduction of thermalization and transmission losses in solar cells when the number of p-n junctions is increased.

modules was developed to analyse the bulk parameters effect on the external quantum effi‐ ciency, photocurrent and photovoltage of the GaInP/GaInAs/Ge multi-junction solar cells.

III-V Multi-Junction Solar Cells http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/50965 445

We present here a brief description of the equations used in our model. Thorough treat‐ ments of photovoltaic devices can be found elsewhere [9]. A schematic of a typical latticematched GaInP/GaInAs/Ge solar cell is shown in Figure1. It consists of an n/p GaInP junction on top of an n/p GaInAs junction which lies on an n/p Ge junction. The triple junc‐

The solar spectrum, striking the front of the cell, includes ultraviolet, visible, and infrared lights. The absorption coefficient for short-wavelength light is quite large, and most of the blue light is absorbed very close to the front of the cell for generating photo carriers. Light with energy slightly larger than the energy gap is weakly absorbed throughout the cell. Light with energy less than the energy gap passes through the front cell and is absorbed in the next one. The photo carriers generated by the short-wavelength light diffuse inside the cell until they are either collected at the p-n junction or recombined with a majority carrier in bulk or at interface. The efficiency of the solar cell increase when all the photo carriers are collected at the junction instead of recombining elsewhere. Thus, recombination is at the

At the first level approximation, multi-junction cells behave like homo-junction cells in ser‐ ies, so their open circuit voltage is the summation of the voltages of the sub-cells, while their

tion cells are series connected by two p++/n++ tunnel junctions.

**2.1. Theoretical approach**

**Figure 1.** Solar cell structure used for simulation.

front and back of the cell effects on the efficiency of the cell.

Future terrestrial cells will likely feature four or more junctions with a performance poten‐ tial capable of reaching over 45% efficiency at concentration of hundreds of suns. The 4-, 5-, or 6-junction solar cells with concentrator trade lower current densities for higher voltage and divide the solar spectrum more efficiently. The lower current densities in these cells can significantly reduce the resistive power loss (I2 R) at high concentrations of suns when com‐ pared with the 3-junction cell [6].

High-efficiency GaInP/GaAs/InGaAs triple-junction solar cells grown inversely with a meta‐ morphic bottom junction could be achieved by replacing the bottom Ge sub-cell with 1 eV en‐ ergy gap material. In0.3Ga0.7As is the promised candidate, if without the lattices mis-match (LMM, around 2%) with the other two sub-cells. Therefore, the LM top and middle sub-cells were grown first, and the graded buffers were employed between middle and bottom cells to overcome the mismatch and to prevent the threading dislocations. The substrate was removed for the reusing. This inverted metamorphic, monolithic triple junction solar cells could be ob‐ tained with at least 2% higher efficiency than the traditional one theoretically [7].

A metamorphic Ga0.35In0.65P/Ga0.83In0.17As/Ge triple-junction solar cell is studied to provide current-matching of all three sub-cells and thus give a device structure with virtually ideal energy gap combination. It is demonstrated that the key for the realization of this device is the improvement of material quality of the lattice-mismatched layers as well as the develop‐ ment of a highly relaxed Ga1−yInyAs buffer structure between the Ge substrate and the mid‐ dle cell. This allows the metamorphic growth with low dislocation densities below 106 cm-2. The performance of the device has been demonstrated by a conversion efficiency of 41.1% at 454 suns AM1.5D [8].

In this chapter, the theoretical and experimental investigation of the most sophisticated, in‐ dustrialized and commercialized GaInP/GaInAs/Ge triple junction solar cell was extensively described. Accelerated aging tests of the high concentration multi-junction solar cells and discussions on outdoor power plant performances were also presented.
