A notable extension is the inclusion of luminescence modelling, which allows Quokka to simulate for example spatially and spectrally resolved photo-luminescence characteristics. Quokka essentially solves for the steady-state electrical characteristics of the device, and is capable to derive various typical solar cell characteristics: fixed terminal voltage, fixed terminal current, open-circuit (OC) conditions, maximum-power-point (MPP) conditions, short-circuit-current (Jsc) conditions, light- and dark-IV curve, quantum-efficiency (QE) curve, suns-Voc curve and series-resistance (Rs) curve. experimentally, but makes Quokka not (directly) applicable if for example an optimization of the doping profile is of interest. This is well suitable if those inputs are the ones derived e.g. The inputs required are rather lumped properties of such regions, most importantly the sheet resistance and the effective recombination characteristic like for example the emitter saturation current density J 0e. Here near-surface regions, for example an emitter diffusion, are not modelled in detail by defining the doping profile and surface recombination etc.
The main modelling difference to most other device simulation software comes with the conductive boundary simplification. Thus Quokka enables to simulate even moderately complex 3D silicon solar cell device geometries in short computation times on standard computers, while providing a similar level of accuracy and generality as state-of-the-art commercial device simulation software.
Those simplifications, namely quasi-neutrality and conductive boundaries, are well validated to not impose notable loss of generality or accuracy for wafer-based silicon solar cell devices.
It employs simplifications to the general semiconductor carrier transport model, which results in much less computational effort compared to alternative simulation software. Quokka is a free software tool specialized for the fast simulation of silicon solar cell devices in one to three dimensions.