Lithium-ion batteries have been the premiere power source in the mobile electronics industry due to their superior energy density and cycle life as compared to other battery chemistries. In the Era of the Internet of Things (IoT) there is an increasing need to find a viable power source to support millimeter-size and smaller scale devices in the fields of environmental sensing, biomedical devices, and wearable electronics. Three-dimensional battery architectures mitigate the limitations of traditional thin film batteries through improvement of ion transport properties allowing for higher areal loading of active materials. Atomic layer deposition not only offers the ability to synthesize a wide range of functional materials, but crucially is a non-line-of-sight deposition technique that allows for conformal deposition necessary for fabrication of 3D lithium-ion batteries. In this work, two ALD processes were developed to synthesize conformal thin films applicable to 3D battery fabrication – LiAlSiO_4, a solid-state electrolyte, and LiMn_2O_4, a high-rate thin film cathode.
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