Evaluations of microcrystalline silicon cells by fast pole figure

It is hard to observe the distribution of orientations and grain boundaries of grains in the film because microcrystalline silicon film has very small grains less than 10 nm. We utilized a new X-ray diffraction method named fast pole figure to observe the angular distributions of grains´ orientations near diffractive lattice planes of Si, such as (111), (220), (311), and (331). We examined the relationship between the angular distributions and the properties of the microcrystalline silicon cells. The results show that the cell has either a single peak or double peaks at the Si (220) pole in the angular distribution, and decreasing of the FWHM of the single peak tends to increase the cell efficiency.