Simulation of Photovoltaic Cell | Quantum Dots

[sumit34]

Hello,
I am working on photovoltaic cell. I want to simulate it in QuantumWise. I want to know if it is possible to simulate the cell. I want to obtain I-V characteristics for the same. Also, is there a way to illuminate these devices in the software?
Later, I plan to introduce Quantum dots in the structure. How to do it?
Please help!

[Petr Khomyakov]

It really depends on what you mean by saying "simulate the cell". What kind of PV cells are you working on?  How large is the corresponding device structure of your interest? Do you want to simulate a part of the device or the entire device?

[sumit34]

I want to obtain I-V characteristics for the device with and without illumination. To be more specific, they are Quantum dot based solar cells. The size is going to be in microns (for 2D it is about 50μmx10μm). I want to obtain the I-V characteristics for the whole device.

[Petr Khomyakov]

If you want to simulate the entire device of 2 microns, you need to use TCAD tools that are designed to study devices at the macroscopic level in the continuum approximation. VNL-ATK is meant for atomistic modeling of devices at the microscopic level. 

VNL-ATK can, however, be used to extract microscopic, material-specific parameters for TCAD models that adopt this kind of parameters as input. You may also construct and visualize a nanoscaled device in VNL-ATK, e.g., a quantum dot attached to electrodes, and then calculate IV characteristics or other properties of this kind of nanodevices.