Design Flexibility of Ultrahigh Efficiency Four-Junction Inverted Metamorphic Solar Cells

The inverted metamorphic solar cell has highly tunable bandgaps, in part due to the metamorphic subcells. Using phosphide-based compositionally graded buffers, we show a wide variety of GaInAs solar cells, ranging in bandgap from 1.2 to 0.7 eV. These metamorphic subcells are all high quality and can be used for a wide variety of multijunction designs. GaInAs solar cells with 0.70 eV bandgaps are developed using an InAsP buffer that extends beyond the InP lattice constant, allowing access to an additional 2 mA/cm(2) of photocurrent at AM1.5D and 25 degrees C. This subcell is implemented into a four-junction inverted metamorphic solar cell combined with an appropriate antireflective coating, which increases the series-connected multijunction current by 0.5 mA/cm(2) with respect to designs using 0.74-eV GaInAs. However, the optimal design depends on the spectrum and operating temperature. We show how the device flexibility can be used to fine-tune the design for various spectra in order to maximize energy yield for a given operating condition. One-sun devices achieve 35.3 +/- 1.2% efficiency under the AM0 spectra and 37.8 +/- 1.2% efficiency under the global spectra at 25 degrees C. Concentrator devices designed for elevated operating temperature achieve 45.6 +/- 2.3% peak efficiency under 690x the direct spectrum and 45.2 +/- 2.3% efficiency at 1000x and 25 degrees C. Device optimization is performed for the direct spectrum on 1 sun devices with 2% shadowing, which achieve 39.8 +/- 1.2% efficiency under the direct spectrum at 1 sun, highlighting the excellent performance and bandgap tunability of the four-junction inverted metamorphic solar cell.