Rapid, High-Throughput, Multimodal Characterization of Emergent PV Materials and Device Insights
Minhal Hasham a, Anthony Troupe a, Brandon Motes a, Ethan Schwartz b, Amy Louks b, Axel Palmstrom c, Joseph Berry c, Zhaoyang Han d, Qi Jang d, J. Devin MacKenzie b
a Optigon, Inc., Somerville Avenue, 444, Somerville, United States
b University of Washington, Seattle
c National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO 80401, USA
d Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Proceedings of International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV26)
Uppsala, Sweden, 2026 May 18th - 20th
Organizers: Gerrit Boschloo, Ellen Moons, Feng Gao and Anders Hagfeldt
Oral, Minhal Hasham, presentation 101
Publication date: 11th March 2026

Metal–halide perovskites have emerged as leading absorber materials for both single-junction and tandem solar cells owing to their low-temperature processing and rapidly advancing performance, with single-junction devices now exceeding 27% power conversion efficiency. Despite this progress, present devices remain below their thermodynamic efficiency limits and suffer from insufficient operational stability. Reaching and maintaining these limiting efficiencies requires a holistic understanding of the microscopic mechanisms involved in device degradation; however, conventional characterization is time consuming and low-throughput. Here, we present the Optigon Prism: a rapid, multimodal, and high-throughput optical metrology tool designed to accelerate materials characterization and production insights. Prism integrates broadband transmission/reflection, time-, and spectrally-resolved photoluminescence measurements into one device to capture holistic datasets, which are used to characterize the response of perovskite solar cells during stress testing and quickly generate device-level insight. We demonstrate that these multimodal datasets can be used to extract and track in situ changes in material parameters during stress testing, such as the non-radiative recombination rate, which can be diagnostic of overall device performance. In subsequent experiments, we show that these datasets combined with our analytical framework can be used to infer device properties without the need to fully complete devices. We measure 120 semi-fabricated devices (“half-stacks”) in 10 minutes and use this large dataset to infer the open-circuit voltage (VOC) expected from a complete device.[1] Using this full suite of optical characterization, we quantify losses from non-radiative recombination, leading to a realistic assessment of VOC. We find that our inferred VOC quantitatively correlates with measured voltages on identically fabricated, fully completed sister samples, while our method also captures the effects of electron transport layer deposition on VOC across 5 unique device architectures. Taken together, we show that non-contact optical measurements are a rapid and accurate method to access key metrics relevant to device efficiency and stability, with minimal device fabrication required. Overall, this work demonstrates that rapid and high-throughput optical characterization is invaluable in accelerating the device iteration timeline both by providing in situ material responses to stability testing and device level insight without needing fully fabricated devices.

© FUNDACIO DE LA COMUNITAT VALENCIANA SCITO
We use our own and third party cookies for analysing and measuring usage of our website to improve our services. If you continue browsing, we consider accepting its use. You can check our Cookies Policy in which you will also find how to configure your web browser for the use of cookies. More info