Development of Ultrathin Ultracapacitors for Enhanced Lithium Batteries in Portable Electronic Applications

摘要

The direction of consumer electronics products, such as mobile communication devices (e.g., smart phones, laptop computers, etc.) favors smaller and thinner devices with greater functionality crammed onto ever-denser PCBs. Consumers are also increasingly demanding devices that run more combinations of asynchronous, power-hungry operations simultaneously. Future battery technologies are promising higher energy density, such as those based on silicon anodes, mg-ion, or other, but typically have lower power density and deliver a significant portion of their increased energy at voltages close to the lower compatibility limits of critical mobile communication devices, such as radio power amplifiers. The convergence of these trends is increasingly more noticeable by consumer battery life complaints, and begs for a solution to decouple energy and power requirements. Unfortunately, the solutions offered by current supercapacitors are too large and expensive, and cannot meet long-term performance and reliability requirements. However, the use of thin supercapacitors connected directly in parallel with the battery, such as being developed by Paper Battery Company, will soon provide successful solutions to decouple product energy and power requirements in many applications. As two of many possible examples, radio applications like the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) and LTE (Long Term Evolution) that require burst-type communications with low duty-cycles are particularly well suited for a hybrid battery-supercapacitor energy storage device to deliver longer battery life.