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Supercapacitor-On-a-Chip Now One Step Closer (ieee.org)
schwit1 writes: In 2010 Spectrum reported a new approach for creating chip-scale supercapacitors on silicon wafers, proposed by researchers at Drexel University in Philadelphia and the Universite Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France. In an article published in Science, the researchers described how to make supercapacitor electrodes from porous carbon that could stick to the surface of silicon wafers so that they could be micromachined into electrodes for on-chip supercapacitors. Now the same team has finally succeeded in doing just that.
In a paper published in this week's Science, researchers from the two initial teams report creating efficient porous carbon electrodes that really stick to the surface of a silicon wafer. They made layers of porous carbide derived carbon (CDC) that are completely compatible with all treatments used in the semiconductor industry, says Patrice Simon, a researcher at Universite Paul Sabatier who has researched porous CDC electrodes over the last ten years and co-authored both the 2010 and this week's paper in Science.
A supercapacitor is like a battery that can store 10 to 100 times more energy per unit volume, can discharge faster, can recharge faster, and can recharge more frequently with less degradation. Until recently, supercapacitors were about 10 times larger than batteries with the same capacity, but researchers have just figured out how to fabricate better supercapacitors. And now, apparently, they have a new approach that can do it on regular chips.
Some short-term implications include: the biggest, heaviest, and least robust component in your phone is no longer needed; electronics will no longer depend on child slaves in Asia who solder batteries to chips; RFID chips could use this to continue computing long after the signal is lost while remaining microscopic; the heaviest component in flying drones no longer needs be heavy.
Longer-term implications include: implantable nano-robots will no longer require large amounts of poisonous metals to store a charge; our dependency on the power-grid may be wiped out by the new ability to print super-cheap energy storage devices, creating a new decentralized energy economy; maybe we will soon be able to print super-tiny weapons that can intelligently recognize their targets and deliver lethal doses of energy.
This article Is about installing super capacitors on the board replacing regular capacitors. Not about replacing the battery
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I'm not clear on this either. Why would someone want to build a large-area device, like a super-capacitor, on top of an IC? given that the cost per unit surface area of a modern IC is astronomical?
Because a supercapacitor is not defined by being a large area. A supercapacitor can be any area.
Its defining characteristic is a higher capacitance per unit area than conventional capacitors. So, a supercapacitor is actually smaller area than the same capacitance in a conventional cap.
The question is particularly complex, as we are talking about super-capacitors. Super-capacitors usually have terrible AC characteristics.
Some, but not all, applications of capacitors require good AC characteristics.
Utter and complete bullshit. No supercapacitor comes anywhere near the volumetric energy density of even a fair to middling battery.
You could have found this out in about 5 seconds, even if you are too ignorant to already know it.
Supercapacitor: 0.06-0.05 MJ/l
Lead acid battery: 0.56 MJ/l
Lithium-ion battery: 0.9–2.63 MJ/l