Smart Dust Batteries Integrated with Near-Zero-Power Surveillance

2026-07-22

The lack of an on-chip power source providing uninterrupted energy impedes the progress of smart dust in moving from lab-level demonstrations to everyday applications. Tiny generators relying on external energy sources face spatial and temporal limitations. Batteries with adequate energy are not available in an area of less than 1 mm2, and the reasons for their absence are manifold. Mainstream battery architectures require either thick or tall electrodes created by etching into the wafer, but it is very fiddly to deposit materials onto these electrodes without defects. High-capacity materials such as lithium cobalt oxide, sulfur and lithium metal are often excluded because on-chip techniques to synthesize or stabilize such materials are missing. Moreover, a low-power monitor to provide precise information about the energy storage state and battery health is essential for real applications but unexplored so far. These difficulties demand a paradigm shift in microbattery development to pursue novel approaches that offer energy-dense microbatteries integrable into microsystems. Therefore, we propose a micro-origami technology for on-chip microbatteries using aqueous zinc battery chemistry, together with embedded surveillance based on a non-volatile redox transistor with near-zero power consumption. SMADBINS is expected to bring advances in battery chemistry and materials and on-chip energy production and management, boosting research for microbattery and smart dust applications, as was recently highlighted by the PI [Nature, 2021, 589, 195]. The PI has decisively contributed to the field of aqueous microbatteries and developed the smart dust battery concept together with his team in several publications. However, a smart dust battery has not been achieved yet. Therefore, the main objective of this project is to develop the first smart dust battery embedded with a low-power monitor, which attains a footprint capacity of more than 10 mAh/cm2 within 1 mm2.

Germany

2026-03-01