Picosun Group, a Finnish company, well-known for its AGILE ALD (Atomic Layer Deposition) thin film coating technology for global industries, reported excellent results in using ALD in the manufacturing of lithium ion thin film battery materials.
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ALD is the leading thin film technology by Picosun. ALD is 100% conformal, 100% uniform, pinhole-free and repeatable. Picosun provides the most advanced ALD thin film coating technology to enable the industrial leap into the future.
Solid-state Li-ion thin film batteries (SSLIBs) are ideal power sources for wearable medical devices, laptops, smartphones and other technologies because they are small, safe and possess excellent energy storage capacity. Li-ion batteries have made such an impact on our daily lives that its developers, Dr. John B. Goodenough, Dr. M. Stanley Whittingham, and Dr. Akira Yoshino, earned the Nobel chemistry prize this year.
Picosun has successfully used its ALD technology to fabricate high-quality, high-performance thin film NiO anodes for SSLIBs. Compared to graphite, which is widely used to produce anodes of lithium-ion batteries, deposited NiO films had more than twice as large capacity and more than three times as high density. The surpassing characteristics of NiO potentially allow improvement of the energy density of SSLIBs, reports Picosun in a press release.
“Battery applications are yet one example of ALD’s flexibility as a method, and how new industries discover the possibilities of ALD day by day, said Dr. Jani Kivioja, CTO of Picosun Group. “Deep trenches with aspect ratios exceeding 1:2500 have been successfully coated with our ALD tools equipped with our patented Picoflow feature, which further advocates the use of our technology in 3D solid state Li-ion battery manufacturing. We are happy that our ALD solutions can be potentially utilized in future’s energy storage solutions in conjunction with clean energy production, and to power more compact healthcare devices, to improve people’s quality of life.”
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In addition to high quality and performance of the ALD NiO anodes, ALD’s unmatched capability to produce conformal and uniform coatings with excellent purity and repeatability inside challenging microscale architectures such as high aspect ratio trenches make it an ideal method for 3D SSLIB materials manufacturing. Also, the ALD processes for several other anode materials such as SnO2, CoO, and MnO are well-known and thoroughly studied.
