You might be wondering whats this person talking about? How can there be a battery in a paper? If you don't believe what I say, let me prove it to you.
Technology has evolved astronomically over the ages and if you said, "I will carry this machine with me in my pocket one day", people would say, "Are you a Moron?", "Seems like you must have lost it". A computer with an insignificant amount of memory and processing power (compared to the figures we are used to today), would be a gigantic monster larger than the living room in your house. But to their surprise things really took a radical shift with the invention of Transistors in the late 1940's at the dawn of World War II. Once the applications of such tiny yet powerful devices were investigated, implementation did not take a long time. The fruits of the invention were enjoyed immediately.
Over the past 50 years, akin to the permeating nature of the forests, semiconductors and their applications spread all over the world including the remotely located places. Huge investments are being made on research and development to reduce the size of the electronic appliances. People are not interested in carrying a separate bag to hold their electronic goods anymore. They want everything to fit in their pocket, whether its their mobile phone, a camera, or even a PDA for that matter. If there is a sleek phone released with cool applications and pretty features, experts and critics quip "Just what the doctor ordered".
For any gadget to be mobile, the most important part is the battery. Irrespective of the success of the electronic appliance in terms of applications, quality or ease of the graphical user interface, if the battery life is bad, the device is a failure. Consumers today demand the best battery life with least possible size because the size of the batteries determines the size of the equipment. At this critical juncture, imagine these appliances can have paper thin battery. It's not fictional guys, this is expected to be the reality by the end of 2009 and come into complete production by the end of 2010.
An article by R. Colin Johnson in EETimes, July Edition mentioned about the technology being used in manufacturing these minute batteries and also mentioned about some of the targetted markets for these batteries. Couple of examples include the use of these batteries on Smart Credit Card, which would providing power for an application to display the current balance on the card at any point of time. Other very obvious example is to use them in Greeting Cards which produce sound when you open them. These batteries dissipate over the time and hence the target is to use them in short-term applications.
While this has been the call on minute batteries by Scientists at Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems and their research colleagues, researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and MIT have developed a new material that eliminates the need for multilayer battery. In an article presented in ARS Technica, the technology used to build these batteries is explained. These scientists used carbon nanotubes on Silicon substrate and filled up the gaps between the tubes with plain old paper. The next obvious question we might have is "How much power do these batteries provide?". Researchers have indicated that small prototypes of these batteries are already capable of powering small mechanical devices like fans. Well if they can provide the power necessary to do such an act, why not be used as batteries on our cellphones and PDAs. That would save a lot of space and reduce the weight of the gadgets considerably isn't it?
This would be a great technological advancement and a path breaking step in the field of consumer electronics and hence I thought of sharing this information.
Thank you very much for reading the blog. Please leave your comments on the post.
References:
- EETimes, July Edition, Article "Paper-Thin Batteries set to arrive by 2010" by R. Colin Johnson.
- ARS Technica Article "Scientists create paper-thin, flexible, biodegradable battery".
Sincerely,
Krishna Chaitanya Emani.
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