Precipitate-related injection-dependent carrier lifetime in n- and p-type silicon

We propose a fast and easy way to calculate the precipitate-related carrier recombination / lifetime in n- and p-type silicon as a function of the minority carrier density, the doping level and the precipitate size distribution. The calculation is based on a parameterization of numerical simulation results modeling the thermionic emission currents (recombination currents) at the internal Schottky junction between metallic precipitates and the semiconductor. The carrier lifetimes calculated with the parameterization are in good accordance with the numerically simulated values for a wide range of material properties relevant for silicon photovoltaics, the calculation needing only two sets of parameters (one for each p- and n-type Si). While the numerical simulation of precipitate-related recombination may take several hours, the calculation time using the parameterization is negligible. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).