We fabricated 1-D and 2-D diffraction gratings of SiOx anti-reflection (AR) film grown on a quartz substrate and integrated them into a c-Si photovoltaic (PV) submodule. The light-trapping effect of the resulting submodules was studied in terms of the oblique optical incident angle, θi. As the θi increased, solar conversion efficiency, η, was improved as expected by the increased optical transmission caused by the grating. For θi≤30°, the relative solar conversion efficiency, Δη, of a 1-D SiOx (t=300 nm) grating, compared to that of a flat SiOx AR-coated integrated PV submodule, was improved very little, with a small variation of within 2%, but increased markedly for θi≥40°. We observed a change of Δη as large as 10.7% and 9.5% for the SiOx grating of period t=800 nm and 1200 nm, respectively. For a 2-D SiOx (t=300 nm) grating integrated PV submodule, however, the optical trapping behavior was similar in terms of θi but its variation was small, within ±1.0%.
