A test structure of bypass diodes for on-chip high-voltage silicon photovoltaic cell array

A bypass diode is an effective solution to the issue of output power degradation of a partially-shaded photovoltaic (PV) cell array. In this paper, we present a test structure of bypass diodes for the on-chip high voltage silicon PV cell array which we have previously proposed[3]. This structure was designed to determine the appropriate size of bypass diodes and whether their fabrication process could be performed successfully. We found from the measurement that a diode the diffusion layer of which is 5 μm × 5 μm works and that the diode size does not have an effect on the characteristics of PV cells. We also found that the number of shaded cells can be known from the I-V curve, which is useful when searching for the optimal position and orientation of a PV cell array.