Accuracy of Hysteresis Correction for Silicon Heterojunction Solar Cells – A Simulation Study

In photovoltaic industry, the time used for current-voltage measurements should be as short as possible in order to achieve a high throughput. However, for short measurement times, capacitive effects and hysteresis might occur which cause deviations of the measured current-voltage data from steady state. In this work, we simulate capacitive effects and hysteresis for a silicon heterojunction solar cell using TCAD (technology computer-aided design) and compare the results with analytical approaches. A differential equation for modelling the transient current-voltage curves based on the diffusion capacitance is found to be in excellent agreement with the TCAD simulations. Furthermore, we investigate a method for hysteresis correction, which is shown to be very accurate even for short measurement times. This makes it a feasible approach for usage in photovoltaic industry.