By: Nick Gambino
The two-pronged approach to most electronics in the past couple decades has been to make them smaller and more powerful. This has slowed down in recent years because you only make things so small before they become unusable, but the quest for more power has continued.
Now it seems TDK has created a new small battery, CeraCharge, that is capable of 100 times more energy than any of its previous iterations in wearables. This is due in large part to a new material they developed for the solid-state battery.
“Utilizing TDK’s proprietary technology, TDK has managed to develop a material for the new solid-state battery with a significantly higher energy density than TDK’s conventional mass-produced solid-state batteries due to the use of oxide-based solid electrolyte and lithium alloy anodes,” the company said in a press release.
These new materials not only allow for more energy density, but it’s also a lot more stable making it safer than anything previously developed in this space.The new TDK tech delivers 1,000 watt hours per liter. I’m not going to pretend I know much about what that means, but I’m told it’s really good.
Obviously a battery this size and that delivers that much power is best suited for smaller electronics like smartwatches, headphones, hearing aids and other wearables.
Solid-state batteries are without question the future of wearables because they hold a lot more charge than the traditional lithium-ion battery. Beyond just holding more energy in a single battery, it also charges back up faster than lithium-ion.
The main push-back from skeptics on this kind of new solid-state battery is its durability. If the battery can hold more charge and juice up quicker, that’s great, but if it breaks more often than other batteries, it offsets the benefits.
Encasing the battery in a ceramic material, as this one is, makes it more fragile, especially when you make larger versions of the battery for, say, electric vehicles.
But for now, this is a major breakthrough for wearables and I wouldn’t be surprised if TDK’s new solid-state battery was adopted by major manufacturers in the near future.
