YAMADA-Shigeru

YAMADA Shigeru
Title Assistant Professor
Department Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering
Course Electrical and Electronic Course

Research fields

Recently, solar cells have spread rapidly, and efforts toward main power supply are accelerating. In particular, silicon solar cells have dominated the photovoltaic market. This trend is expected to continue in the future. On the other hands, the energy conversion efficiency of crystalline silicon solar cells is getting close to the theoretical energy conversion efficiency limit. In order to further enhance the conversion efficiency, the development of multi-junction solar cells, which include several light absorption materials with different band-gap energies, is expected.

Although the band-gap energy of crystalline silicon is a fixed value at a constant temperature, the band-gap energy varies as the size of crystalline silicon becomes smaller than sub-nanometer (Quantum size effect). It is expected that multi-junction solar cells using crystalline silicon materials as the light absorption layers can be realized by taking advantage of the quantum size effect.

We have mainly researched on fabrication and evaluation of silicon quantum structures. Since high-quality structures are needed to enhance conversion efficiency of solar cells, we are developing defect reduction techniques. Furthermore, we are developing doping layer materials for the solar cell structure.

Research Keywords

Semiconductors, Solar cells, Silicon-related materials, Quantum size effect

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