Development of Theoretical Model for Effective Carrier Lifetime in Polycrystalline Semiconductors

The effective minority carrier lifetime (EMCL) is one of the critical parameters used to determine the performance of polycrystalline (pc) semiconductor-based electronic and photosensitive devices. A novel theoretical model has been developed to investigate the EMCL for pc-semiconductors from their grain boundary (GB) image. The model considers Gaussian-distributed donor- and acceptor-like traps with an unequal capture cross section of electrons and holes. The whole GB image is considered to be composed of multiple small cells for developing the model. The EMCL of some pc-semiconductors has been computed from their reported GB images. The developed model is validated by comparing the obtained EMCLs with their reported experimental values. It has been observed that reducing the cell size ( ${d}$ ) improves the accuracy of the model, however, at the cost of increased computational time.