A Deep Dive into Cu2 ZnSnS4 (CZTS) Solar Cells: A Review of Exploring Roadblocks, Breakthroughs, and Shaping the Future

Renewable energy is crucial for sustainable future, and Cu2 ZnSnS4 (CZTS) based solar cells shine as a beacon of hope. CZTS, composed of abundant, low-cost, and non-toxic elements, shares similarities with Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS). However, despite its promise and appealing properties for solar cells, CZTS-based solar cells faces performance challenges owing to inherent issues with CZTS material, and conventional substrate structure complexities. This review critically examines these roadblocks, explores ongoing efforts and breakthroughs, providing insight into the evolving landscape of CZTS-based solar cells research. Furthermore, as an optimistic turn in the field, the review first highlights the crucial need to transition to a superstrate structure for CZTS-based single junction devices, and summarizes the substantial progress made in this direction. Subsequently, dive into the discussion about the fascinating realm of CZTS-based tandem devices, providing an overview of the existing literature as well as outlining the possible potential strategies for enhancing the efficiency of such devices. Finally, the review provides a useful outlook that outlines the priorities for future research and suggesting where efforts should concentrate to shape the future of CZTS-based solar cells.

Strong Noise Rejection in VLC Links under Realistic Conditions through a Real-Time SDR Front-End

One of the main challenges in the deployment of visible light communication (VLC) in realistic application fields, such as intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), is represented by the presence of large background noise levels on top of the optical signal carrying the digital information. A versatile and effective digital filtering technique is, hence, crucial to face such an issue in an effective way. In this paper, we present an extensive experimental evaluation of a complete VLC system, embedding a software-defined-radio (SDR)-based digital signal processing (DSP) filter stage, which is tested either indoors, in the presence of strong artificial 100-Hz stray illumination, and outdoors, under direct sunlight. The system employs low-power automotive LED lamps, and it is tested for baud rates up to 1 Mbaud. We experimentally demonstrate that the use of the DSP technique improves 10× the performance of the VLC receiver over the original system without the filtering stage, reporting a very effective rejection of both 100-Hz and solar noise background. Indoors, the noise margin in the presence of strong 100-Hz noise is increased by up to 40 dB, whilst in the outdoor configuration, the system is capable of maintaining error-free communication in direct sunlight conditions, up to 7.5 m, improving the distance by a factor of 1.6 compared to the case without filtering. We believe that the proposed system is a very effective solution for the suppression of various types of noise effects in a large set of VLC applications.

The Role of Bidirectional VLC Systems in Low-Latency 6G Vehicular Networks and Comparison with IEEE802.11p and LTE/5G C-V2X

In this paper, we present very recent results regarding the latency characterization of a novel bidirectional visible light communication (VLC) system for vehicular applications, which could be relevant in intelligent transportation system (ITS) safety applications, such as the assisted and automated braking of cars and motorbikes in critical situations. The VLC system has been implemented using real motorbike head- and tail-lights with distances up to 27 m in a realistic outdoor scenario. We performed a detailed statistical analysis of the observed error distribution in the communication process, assessing the most probable statistical values of expected latency depending on the observed packet error rate (PER). A minimum attainable observed round-trip latency of 2.5 ms was measured. Using our dataset, we have also estimated the probability to receive correctly a message with a specific average latency for a target PER, and we compare it to the ultra-reliable low-latency (URLL) 5G communications service. In addition, a mobility model is implemented to compare the VLC and radio frequency (RF) technologies (IEEE802.11p, LTE, 5G) to support an automated braking systems for vehicles in urban platooning.