Thin Film Batteries - Chemistries, Materials and Opportunities of Thin-Film Batteries in Printed Electronics by Nanomarkets

Topics Covered

Background
Applications for Printable and Organic Electronics
Powering Printable and Organic Electronics with Thin-film Batteries
Advantages of Thin-film Batteries
     Form Factor of Thin-film Batteries
     Intrinsically Safe Properties of Thin-film Batteries
     Temperature Stability of Thin-film Batteries
Market Forecast on Future Applications of Thin-film Batteries in Printed Electronics
Thin-Film Battery Chemistries, Materials and Technological Alternatives
Challenges and Competition in the Thin-Film Battery Business
Summary

Background

NanoMarkets is a leading provider of market and technology research and industry analysis services for the thin film, organic and printable electronics businesses (which we refer to as TOP Electronics.) Since the firm’s founding, NanoMarkets has published over two dozen comprehensive research reports on emerging technology markets. Topics covered have included sensors, displays, OLEDs, HB-LEDs, e-paper, RFID, photovoltaics, smart packaging, novel battery technologies, printed electronics, organic electronics, emerging memory and storage technologies and other promising technologies. Our client roster is a who’s who of companies in specialty chemicals, materials, electronics applications and manufacturing. NanoMarkets also hosts a blog at www.nanotopblog.com where we discuss technology trends, company announcements and the industry’s on-going progress.

Applications for Printable and Organic Electronics

Many of the actual or envisioned applications for printable and organic electronics--and low-performance electronics more generally--require their own power sources to make them function. Cases in point include active RFID tags, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), active cosmetic/drug delivery patches, low-cost medical diagnostic products, remote sensor arrays, powered smart cards and smart packaging of various types. This is simply because they are "mobile" devices and therefore cannot be plugged into the wall (e.g., smartcards) or are not likely to be near a socket (e.g., ESLs).

Powering Printable and Organic Electronics with Thin-film Batteries

Today, the power sources used for such devices are mostly button/hearing aid/coin batteries, or sometimes even larger batteries. In many cases, these batteries are quite suitable for the task in terms of power output and longevity. They are also very inexpensive, long-lived, have decent energy densities, and are based on very mature technology. Given all this, there is--on the face of it--no good reason why anyone should spend time developing new kinds of batteries for these devices. At least, there is no good reason why a firm should spend time in this way and expect to make money!

Advantages of Thin-film Batteries

Nonetheless, a growing number of firms are looking for something better--thin-film batteries. These companies cite the following advantages:

Form Factor of Thin-film Batteries

Thin-film batteries are often better suited by virtue of their form factor than any other kind for powering thin-film electronics. Consider an ultra-thin smartcard bristling with printed thin-film transistors that had to be powered by a button battery twice its thickness. (Compared to conventional batteries, which are never that thin, thin-film batteries now being commercialized are typically just a few millimeters thick.) This would not be the kind of product that most consumers would want to carry in their wallet and this is an important factor for Visa and other credit card companies that hope the world will move to powered smartcards that can, for example, provide enhanced security with one time password (OTP) systems.

Intrinsically Safe Properties of Thin-film Batteries

Compared to conventional button batteries, thin-film batteries typically rely on all solid-state materials and an inorganic glass electrolyte; as a result, these batteries are intrinsically safe and do not pose the risks of spilling, boiling or gassing associated with traditional batteries. While safety is really not a major threat with conventional batteries, the exploding laptop battery scare of a few years back has sensitized the consuming public that batteries can be a threat.

Temperature Stability of Thin-film Batteries

Most existing rechargeable batteries lose performance at high temperatures. Several producers of thin-film batteries claim that their technologies demonstrate superior temperature stability and can operate up to about 150° Celsius.

Market Forecast on Future Applications of Thin-film Batteries in Printed Electronics

All that being said, the current generation of thin-film batteries is much more expensive than existing button batteries. This is because (1) there is a need to recapture development costs over a relatively short period of time, while development costs in the case of the button battery have long since been recovered, and (2) the production volumes for button batteries are huge, while for thin-film batteries they are very small. For thin-film batteries, economies of scale seldom if ever apply.

So, are the benefits mentioned above really sufficient to make people pay more for their batteries? In certain limited cases the answer appears to be yes. We expect thin-film batteries to target applications where the current battery technology is deficient in some way that can be addressed by thin-film battery technology, such as the self-discharge limitations associated with super capacitors or shelf-life limitations common to chemical batteries. NanoMarkets also expects these batteries to target applications that are not possible or at least that are provably hard to accomplish without thin-film technology. Some of the applications that thin-film battery producers are targeting that supposedly fit into this category include powered smartcards, memory chips, active and semi-passive RFID tags, medical implants, and cosmetic and drug-delivery patches. The markets for these applications will (it is claimed) be willing to pay somewhat of a premium for the attributes mentioned above--thin, low-profile form, reduced environmental footprint, intrinsic safety, and temperature stability.

Still, NanoMarkets does not believe that there will be enough of a demand for thin-film batteries to grow into a significant market or to support anything like the number of firms that want to play in this space until costs come down significantly. Instead, we expect this area to evolve over time through the following: (1) improved marketing, leading to larger orders, which in turn will lead to economies of scale, and (2) the development and use of better manufacturing technologies. Using printing to manufacture batteries, for example, is getting considerable attention at the present time and NanoMarkets has a separate report on printed batteries. In addition, integrating the manufacture of the battery with that of the product that it will power carries with it obvious cost savings.

In the meantime, while waiting for cost improvements to appear, some battery manufacturers are capturing value by moving up the chain and selling products--such as cosmetic patches--in which their batteries are used. This strategy serves both as a way to make some more money in the short term and to demonstrate the use of the firms thin-film technology, which in turn--it is hoped--will lead to more orders.

The thin-film battery will never be a panacea, however. We do not expect thin-film batteries to represent the next generation of batteries for mobile electronics, for example. In the distant future, thin-film batteries may have much wider applicability; there are experiments that suggest that they could be used to power cars, for example. But, in this report, we are not primarily concerned with the more futuristic applications that have been proposed.

Thin-Film Battery Chemistries, Materials and Technological Alternatives

There are many technology directions that are being taken to achieve effective thin-film batteries of the kind discussed above. How these are likely to shape up, which applications these technologies will ultimately serve and which technologies may ultimately fade away is a major theme of this report. It seems pretty certain that as applications mature, some of the chemistries and materials used in thin-film batteries will be proven to have a certain level of general applicability, some will find niche applications where special conditions apply (such as in medical implants) and others will disappear.

Today, the majority of thin-film batteries are lithium based. Lithium-ion batteries have the ability to withstand high temperatures. This could be useful in certain manufacturing environments, such as when batteries are used with smartcards that have to endure a high temperature lamination process. The next stage in thin-film battery evolution from lithium-ion is to lithium-ion-polymer (LiPo), which relies on a solid electrolyte (sometimes gel) instead of a porous substrate that has been soaked with a liquid electrolyte. These batteries offers improvements in terms of lower cost manufacturing and robustness, and can be as thin as one millimeter. Yet other variations of the lithium battery theme that are being commercialized are lithium metal, lithium manganese dioxide, lithium thionyl chloride and lithium oxygen. Lithium phosphorus oxynitride (LiPON), which was originally developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is frequently used as the electrolyte in thin-film batteries today, but other types of electrolyte are being developed.

There are also some thin-film and especially printable batteries that are being developed using chemistries other than ones based on lithium. Blue Spark Technologies, formerly Thin-film Technologies, uses zinc-carbon for its battery technology and several other firms are using zinc-manganese dioxide. A few researchers have been working on using biomaterials; this is mostly work being done in universities and research institutes, but Sony is also involved. Yet another research direction is radioisotope batteries. Some of these more exotic materials really have no chance of becoming a mainstream battery technology, but they could have specialist applications in medical, military and scientific research.

Challenges and Competition in the Thin-Film Battery Business

There are a number of challenges that will have to be overcome before thin-film batteries can start to generate significant revenues and this report discusses them in some depth. These include the following:

• Capacity needs to be established to manufacture cells with emerging chemistries. As we have already mentioned, thin-film batteries are not likely to grow into a substantial and profitable industry until high-volume production can be justified. But this will mean a call on equity investors and/or bankers for significant amounts of capital. This will be especially challenging in the current economic environment
• It also needs to be proven that thin-film batteries can be delivered to customers at price points that make them serious competition for button/coin batteries in high-volume applications. To reiterate, this is quite a challenge, because these more conventional batteries are so inexpensive and, without high volumes, many of the battery types reviewed in this report remain prohibitively expensive.
  All of the major chemistries that are currently being commercialized for volume applications of thin-film batteries have been well researched for many years, so there are unlikely to be huge challenges here. Nonetheless, products at this early stage of development often encounter teething problems; thin-film batteries are unlikely to be the exception to the rule. And while the batteries that we focus on in this report are usually the newbie technologies trying to take a share of the battery market from older technologies, there are also other, sometimes even newer, technologies that represent a challenge to thin-film batteries.

Summary

With this in mind, for each application, it will be important for battery manufacturers to consider the advantages of using a thin-film battery of any kind against non-battery alternatives, as well as against competition from more traditional battery technologies. Thus, a less expensive option to using a battery may well be electrical induction, as is the case with passive RFID and most smartcards. And in the future, a range of energy harvesting technologies may become available for some of the applications toward which thin-film batteries are being targeted.

Yet another possibility would be thin-film fuel cells, an area that has received some attention from technologists and researchers. Whether they could compete with actual thin-film batteries is questionable, but there is certainly plenty of interest in them from the military. Then there are biothermal devices that make use of the thermal energy that is produced naturally in the body. Several firms are looking at this type of technology for powering medical implants, where the advantages are fairly obvious.

Source: "Thin-Film Batteries: Current and Future Markets 2009-2016", Market Report by Nanomarkets

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