GSOC 2018 - Week 1

Introducing .. me:

Hi, my name is Noe Nieto, I live in Mexicali and I’m about to finish my master’s degree on Instituto de Ingeniería UABC Mexicali. My Thesis is about simulation of solar cells, so I felt like doing something related on my first GSOC, so I contacted Juan Sanchez from DevSim and asked him whether he was interested to mentor me for the GSOC. After a couple of emails we came to the idea of enabling DevSim to simulate solar cells. The project URL on the GSOC site.

Right now DevSim already has some interesting features, but it does not have a way to simulate the response of semiconductors with incident light, required to simulate a simple solar cell.

To make that happen, it is necessary to simulate the propagation of light into the structure and the resulting electrical current.

What has been done so far?

• I have to I’ve already compiled DevSim on my Fedora laptop (27 and 28 are working just OK). I also have contributed a couple of patches to the devsim repo.
• I’ve already read the documentation of Devsim and SymDiff; DevSim has some basic support to create meshes, and there’s already a diode example, so I’m going to proceed with that and create a p-n junction with a 1um depth.
• Once I have accomplished the p-n junction I’ll have to work with Juan to stablish how are going to implement light propagation and generation; That’s the core of the project, but it is easier said than done;
• This is all I have on my head now.
• I’m posting my questions directly to the DevSim forum.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

– Noe