Hot spot runaway in thin film photovoltaics and related structures

We show that thin film diode structures, such as photovoltaics and light emitting arrays, can undergo zero threshold localized thermal runaway leading to thermal and electrical nonuniformities spontaneously emerging in originally uniform systems. The linear stability analysis is developed for a system of thermally and electrically coupled two discrete diodes, and for a distributed system. These results are verified with numerical modeling that is not limited to small fluctuations. The discovered instability negatively affects the device performance and reliability. It follows that these problems can be mitigated by properly designing the device geometry and thermal insulation.