wxAMPS Simulation of Electronic Transport Mechanism in Intrinsic and Doped Nanocrystalline Silicon Thin Films

The main objective of this research is a numerical investigation of the transport properties in hydrogenated nanocrystalline silicon thin films for solar cells applications using the wxAMPS software tool. The simulated samples were fabricated at 100°C using radiofrequency magnetron sputtering (RFMS) method with RF power 220 W, a gas mixture of 30% of argon and 70% of hydrogen under a total pressure of 3 Pa and the target – sample holder distance, fixed at 70 mm, were maintained constant for the three categories intrinsic, phosphorus doped and boron doped films at deposition times of 3 and 30 minutes. The simulation carried out in this research, is based on a layer of nanocrystalline silicon that was constructed using successive and alternative crystalline and amorphous thin layers where their total number is depending on the thickness of the considered sample. The electronic transport mechanism is studied and findings clearly demonstrated that doped and undoped samples have different activation energy ( E _a ) which obviously illustrates the crucial role of doping. The E _a is less than 0.2 eV for all the simulated samples strongly indicating a hoping transport mechanism. These results were compared to experimental and previous works where a good agreement was observed.