A Review on the Development of the Inverted Polymer Solar Cell Architecture

Abstract

The increase in energy production costs for fossil fuels has led to a search for an economically viable alternative energy source. One alternative energy source of particular interest is solar energy. A promising alternative to inorganic materials is organic semiconductor polymer solar cells due to their advantages of being cheaper, light weight, flexible and made into large areas by roll-to-roll processing. However, the conventional architecture that is typically used for fabricating solar cells requires high vacuum to deposit the top metal electrode which is not suitable for roll-to-roll processing. Recently an inverted device architecture has been investigated as a suitable architecture for developing the ideal roll-to-roll type processing of polymer-based solar cells. This review will go over the recent advances and approaches in the development of this type of inverted device architecture. We will highlight some of the work that we have done to integrate materials, device, interface, and processing of the inverted device architecture platform to produce more idealized polymer-based solar cells.

Keywords:

• inverted device architecture
• polymer solar cell
• interface engineering
• self assembled monolayers

Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the financial support through the National Science Foundation STC program under DMR-0120967, the DOE “Future Generation Photovoltaic Devices and Process” program under DE-FC36-08GO18024/A000, the Office of Naval Research program under N00014-08-1-1129, the AFOSR “Interface Engineering” program under FA9550-09-1-0426, and the World Class University (WCU) program through the National Research Foundation of Korea under the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (R31-10035). A. K. Y. Jen thanks the Boeing-Johnson Foundation for financial support.