Study of surface passivation of InP

✍ Scribed by Mircea Faur; Maria Faur; Phillip Jenkins; Manju Goradia; Sheila Bailey; Douglas Jayne; Irving Weinberg; Chandra Goradia

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1990
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 677 KB
• Volume: 15
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0142-2421
• DOI: 10.1002/sia.740151207

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

The effects of various surface preparation procedures, including chemical treatments in HF, HNO~3~, o‐H~3~PO~4~ and H~2~SO~4~ solutions and anodic oxidation, on the passivating properties of InP have been investigated in order to optimize the fabrication procedures of n^+^p or p^+^n InP solar cells made by thermal diffusion. The InP substrates used in this study were p‐type Cd‐doped to a level of 1.7 × 10^16^ cm^−3^, Zn‐doped to levels of 2.2 × 10^16^ and 1.2 × 10^18^ cm^−3^ and n‐type S‐doped to 4.4 × 10^18^ cm^−3^. The passivating properties have been evaluated from photoluminescence (PL) data; good agreement was found between the level of surface passivation and the composition of different surface layers as revealed by x‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis.