An improved technique of capacitance measurement of solar cells

Abstract

It is very much important to design an efficient and reliable power conditioner with detailed study on measurement of AC parameter of solar cell (especially the cell capacitance). In this paper, we measured the capacitance of GaAs/Ge and Silicon (BSFR) solar cells under dark condition over a wide range of bias voltages using low level sine wave signal of desired amplitude. The approach of sinusoidal wave method offers the accurate and most economic way of studying the capacitance of semiconductor devices. Here frequency domain techniques have been used. It is shown that for GaAs/Ge solar cell, it exhibits only transition capacitance while Silicon (BSFR) solar cell exhibited both transition and diffusion capacitances.