Organic solar cell with inverted device architecture and 8.3% efficiency.
Imec, Polyera, and Solvay have achieved a new world-record efficiency of 8.3% for polymer-based single junction organic solar cells in an inverted device stack. These performance results represent a crucial step towards successful commercialization of organic photovoltaic cells.

Imec developed a proprietary inverted bulk heterojunction architecture for polymer-based solar cells that simultaneously optimizes cell light management and increases device stability. With this architecture, and a proprietary Polyera semiconductor in the photoactive layer, a team of imec and Solvay researchers now announces a certified conversion efficiency of 8.3%. This is the highest certified efficiency reported to date in the world for inverted polymer cell architectures. This result follows previous reports on imec’s proprietary device architecture, proving that scalable inverted device architectures are applicable to a variety of polymer materials.

Although further improvements of efficiency and lifetime are required to bring this potentially-revolutionary technology to market, inverted device architectures offer a number of commercially-relevant benefits over standard architectures.

(imec)