A model for proton damage in silicon and GaAs solar cells

There is a need to develop a generic model to predict proton damage in both GaAs cells and shallow-diffusion Si cells. The need comes from different areas such as validation of proton test data base, and trade-off studies between GaAs and advanced Silicon solar cells in low earth orbits. This paper describes an expansion of the simple short circuit current (I /SUB sc/ ) degradation model developed by John Wilson et al. This new model preserves the optical wavelength dependency in the photogeneration of minority carrier pairs, which is important to the solar cells with different spectral responses. By so doing, a generic model of solar cell proton damage was developed that predicts the experimental I /SUB sc/ degradations for both GaAs solar cells and Si solar cells closely and predicts the experimental spectral responses of protonirradiated cells reasonably well. The expansion of this model for V /SUB oc/ and P /SUB max/ is currently in progress.