World’s smallest battery is as tiny as a grain of dust, but don’t expect it to power phones yet

Zohaib Ahmed — Sat, 26 Feb 2022 08:12:26 +0000

Researchers at the Chemnitz University of Technology have presented the world’s smallest battery to date as an application-oriented prototype and it shows “encouraging energy storage performance at the sub-square-millimeter scale.” Sized as tiny as a grain of dust, it can already power the world’s smallest computer chips for about ten hours.

The battery has been developed for smart dust applications, which are basically tiny microelectronic devices — an example being biocompatible sensor systems.

To date, micro-battery solutions either outputted too low power, had limitations concerning the usage environment, or were simply not small enough. But the new battery solution can eliminate these shortcomings.

To achieve it, the research team employed the same process that’s used by Tesla to manufacture batteries on a large scale for its electric cars. A “Swiss-roll” or “micro origami” procedure is used to create a product compatible with existing chip manufacturing technologies while being capable of producing high output.

Specifically, the battery’s size is under 1mm² with a minimum energy density of 100 microwatt hours per square centimeter, but it can still be integrated on a chip.

The tech obviously has not been developed with smartphones in mind so to dream about the next iPhone with a dust-sized battery unit would be a stretch. Still, researchers hope to see its deployment into micro- and nanosensors in areas like IoT, miniaturized medical implants, micro-robotic systems, and ultra-flexible electronics.

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World’s smallest battery is as tiny as a grain of dust, but don’t expect it to power phones yet