The vertical multi-junction (VMJ) solar cell has good potential applications in high concentration photovoltaic. The efficiency of VMJ cell reached to 19.19% under 2480 suns has been reported. Numerical calculations show that the efficiency can reach close to 30% after optimization. In this work, the performance of the silicon VMJ cell with front surface diffusion working under 1 sun and 1000 suns was calculated numerically using a TCAD software. The front surface diffusion can reduce the requirement of high quality front surface passivation, but increases the series resistance. The effect of the N-type emitter dopant profile, P+-type back surface field dopant profile, width, thickness, bulk doping concentration and lifetime of the sub-cell on the performance of the VMJ cell with front surface diffusion was calculated and analyzed. The efficiency reached to 30.56% under 1000 suns after optimization. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.