For the shortage of energy and the environmental issues, the development of solar cells has become an important technology. However, solar cells have low efficiency of energy conversion due to their high surface reflection on a flat Si substrate which is 38 %. To decrease the surface reflectance of the silicon solar cells, anti-reflection coatings (ARCs) are proposed on the solar cells. We use Lighttools software to investigate several kinds of ARCs to decrease the surface reflectance. We first consider the reflectance of the single-layer ARC with quarter wavelength. It can effectively decrease about 30 % surface reflection as compared with a flat Si substrate. The half-cylinder texture and the wave texture are designed on a PMMA single-layer coating. It is found that the half-cylinder ARC and the wave ARC can usefully diminish the surface reflectance for perpendicular light. Low reflectance can be achieved in the hemispherical microlens ARCs over an extended spectral region for omnidirectional incident light. The impact of the microlens sizes, periods, and arrangements are investigated. The lowest normal reflectance of the closely-packed triangular-lattice hemispherical microlens ARC is 4.8%. By adding smaller hemispherical microlenses, the surface reflectance of the hemispherical microlens ARC can be as low as 1.86 %. To obtain the lowest average surface reflectance, both-sided patterned surface texture ARCs are designed. Their lowest average surface reflectance is 2.24%. Finally, we simulate the reflectance of the nanowire ARCs. The influence of the wire length and the angle of inclination are discussed for high-efficiency and low-cost solar cells.