Approaches to Reduce the Impact of Edge Recombination in Si Lifetime Samples With Emitter

The injection-dependent effective excess carrier lifetime is an important quantity to describe recombination characteristics in silicon. When measured with the photo-conductance decay technique it is known that for specific sample structures and sizes edge recombination can strongly affect the measured injection-dependent lifetime. Especially in lifetime samples involving an (induced) pn-junction edge recombination can become a dominant effect limiting lifetime towards low injection. We present different approaches to structure samples in order to suppress the detrimental effect of edge recombination on lifetime at low injection.