Technology

The battery market in general and the solid-state battery particularly is a fast-growing market driven by innovation on new materials and chemistries, new manufacturing processes and method, and new production equipment as well.

Patents

Patents

This market is boosted by the emergence of new applications from various industries like electronics, medical devices, home and building automation, smart cities, wearables and e-textile, IoT and more generally wireless sensor networks. Especially, the need to back-up or power up several billions of devices and sensors is an outstanding growth opportunity and drives all the developments for micro-batteries featuring both high energy and high-power densities.

ITEN technologies and products are market-driven. ITEN innovations are all made to serve these performance and quality demanding markets and fast-growing applications. After more than 8 years of research and development, ITEN has moved from lab-scale to mass production and is now recognized as the leading company in the field of solid-state rechargeable micro-batteries. Because a rechargeable solid-state micro-battery in the form of a SMD component storing high energy densities (even when scaled to very small volumes) and delivering high peak currents over a wide operating temperature range is actually unique and solves problems that have not been solved by both traditional battery and supercapacitor technologies yet. This is for sure attested by the fact that ITEN has already been granted more than 150 patents worldwide.

Materials

Materials

ITEN also develops all the key raw materials required for the manufacture of the anode, the cathode and the solid-state electrolyte of its micro-batteries. ITEN thin film batteries do use only solid layers, without any binder or any liquids inside.

Thanks to the specific materials and processes developed by ITEN, it is possible to manufacture micro-batteries optimizing both the energy storage density and the ESR of the micro-batteries so that they are able to deliver peak currents higher than several hundred times the capacity.

As an example, we develop our own specific chemistries and synthesize our own active and solid electrolyte materials which are optimized to enable micro-batteries delivering high

Process

Process

All micro-battery manufacturing steps are developed by ITEN: active material synthesis, thin film deposition, stacking, sintering … . This also includes the encapsulation and the packaging optimized for long calendar aging. Last but not least, final testing hardware and software are also made in-house. ITEN has successfully integrated all the value chain from electrode materials up to the packaging of the SMD multilayered micro-batteries. As an example, ITEN processes enable depositing very thin layers (from a 100 nm to a few µm) directly on large size substrates without making use of costly and lengthy vacuum deposition techniques. One further benefit of the stacking approach is that sizes, form factors and capacities of the micro-batteries can easily be customized without developing any specific package or any specific tooling.

Machines

Machines

Very advanced technologies, materials and processes developed by ITEN do most of the time require the development of specific production equipment so as to meet the performance, reliability and productivity objectives. The assembly process of the micro-batteries (made by stacking very thin anodes and cathodes), their encapsulation process and the manufacture of electrical endings are common know-hows to a variety of devices and solutions proposed by ITEN.
All the production machine specifications have been defined so as enable quick and easy development of customer specific micro-batteries. An example of this flexibility: the capacities and form factors of the micro-batteries can easily be changed by adjusting the cutting defining the area and the number of layers. Last but not least: Before delivery to the customers, each micro-battery manufactured by ITEN is 100% tested on test-benches specifically developed by ITEN.