Impact Impact of different capping layers on carrier injection efficiency between amorphous and crystalline silicon measured using photoluminescence

Intrinsic amorphous silicon provides excellent surface passivation on crystalline silicon. It has previously been shown, that carriers that are photo generated in the amorphous silicon can be efficiently electronically injected into the crystalline silicon. A method to quantify the efficiency of such carrier injection using the spectral response of photoluminescence has recently been demonstrated. This is a contactless method and it can be applied to incomplete device structures. Here we use this technique to measure partially processed hetero-junction devices with different capping layers to quantify their impact on the carrier injection efficiency. Silicon nitride capping on amorphous silicon is shown to have minimum impact on the high carrier injection efficiency of the amorphous layer but doped amorphous capping layer on the other hand were seen to have a strong effect on the carrier injection efficiency. A model was developed to understand the material properties of the amorphous layer. The reduction in carrier injection efficiency with doped amorphous silicon capping layers were attributed to the large defects in the doped layer.