ITEN's Teeny-Tiny Solid-State Batteries Drive Usable IoT Systems in a Bigger Coin-Cell's Place

Self-described "deep tech" specialist ITEN has unveiled an ultra-compact battery capable of driving an autonomous asset monitoring system — and is hoping its little black speck can replace "polluting coin cells" in a range of designs.

"When observing the battery-powered electronic solutions, ITEN came indeed to the following conclusions," the company claims in support of its creation, brought to our attention by CNX Software. "A lot of electronic designs relies on very polluting coin cells, difficult to assemble on printed circuit boards, costly to recycle and requiring periodic maintenance to replace the battery once empty. Depending on the countries, only 30 to 50 per cent of such coin cells are effectively recycled."

"Autonomous embedded systems require less and less energy to operate; however, from time to time, the power supply must deliver high current pulses for instance to drive RF transceivers or actuators," the company continues. "Therefore, most electronic designers must use oversized coin cells because such batteries are known to deliver only small currents."

Its solid-state battery design, ITEN says, resolves all of these problems — and to prove it, has designed an autonomous asset tracing system, which runs both sensors and a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radio-equipped microcontroller from a tiny battery offering just 100µAh of energy storage topped up by a photovoltaic energy-harvesting system capable of running indoors.

Using the battery, which almost disappears on the tip of your finger, the asset ttracking system can send data every 10 seconds during the day and every four to five minutes at night with 24/7 operation — something that, the company claims, would take a 100mAh coin cell, a thousand times the capacity of its solid-state alternative.

ITEN is also pushing its products for numerous other tasks from BLE tagging systems and beacons to data loggers and as battery back-ups to real-time clocks and microcontrollers — providing the latter enough power to send out an alert should a primary power source be lost. Compared to coin cell equivalents, the company claims, its designs are considerably more eco-friendly with no heavy metals, toxic materials, or organic solvents and being fully rechargeable — helping push their carbon footprint down three or four orders of magnitude smaller than coin cell alternatives.

ITEN is presenting its design at Electronica 2022 this week, with more information available on the company website.