NANOcrystalline silicon films for PHOTOvoltaic and optoelectronic applications

Nanocrystalline silicon (nc-Si) is not only a truly multifunctional material, due to its potential utilization as a active substrate for a variety of optoelectronic applications (photovoltaic cells, flat plate displays, light emitting diodes), but it presents also the advantage of being a silicon-based, low cost, environmentally clean material. Therefore, although the optoelectronic properties of nc-Si could not be compared, on the base of the today knowledge, with those of III-V compounds, the possibility of a direct integration of nc-Si devices on silicon substrates used in silicon microelectronics and its better environmental stability with respect to amorphous silicon (a-Si) make of nc-Si a promising opportunity, at least for consumer electronics and low cost photovoltaics. The work is divided in four main packages, of which the first covers the modelling activities, and the other three the material growth, its characterization and some prototyping activities.