Abstract:The solar cells with impurity photovoltaic effect can make use of the solar photons with the energy less than the bandgap. The impurity photovoltaic effect doped with carbon for silicon solar cells was investigated by numerical methods. The results show that the cell efficiency can increase by about 2.0% since some subband photons are absorbed due to the impurity photovoltaic effect. The improvement of the solar cell performance attributes to the extension of the infrared response. It can be concluded that employing carbon for impurity photovoltaic effect is a promising way for higher efficiency.