INTRODUCTION

Hello everyone in this noble community, in this post I want to talk about computers and technology.

It is of no doubt that our world of today has now been ruled by computer and technology because without them, human life and livelihood would have been much more complicated.

The bulkiness and hugeness of computers are also reducing as the advancement of technology is increasing as days are passing by.

MAIN SUBJECT

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Smart dust application (small microelectronic devices), such as biocompatible sensor system in the human body, needs computers and batteries smaller than the dust mote. So far, this development has been hindered by two main factors; Lack of on-chip power sources for operation anytime and anywhere and difficulties in producing integrable microbatteries.

In the journal published by Advance Energy Materials, Reseachers presents a solution to these challenge.

The reseachers discuss how battery powered smart dust application can be realized in the sub-milimeter-scale and has introduced the world's smallest battery by far as an application-oriented prototype.

The researchers says that their results shows good energy storage performance at the sub-square-milimeter scale.

The power to run tiny sub-milimeter scale computers can be provided by making suitable batteries or "harvesting" method to generate electricity.

In the area of "harvesting," micro-themoelectric generators, to use as an example can transform heat to elctricity, but their power is too small for dust-sized chips to work with.

Mechanical vibrations are other sources of energy which can power small-scale devices. Small photovoltaic cells that can transfom light into electrical energy on samll chips are also dependable. On the other hand, light and vibrators are not always available at all times and in all places which makes their demanded operations impossible in a lot of environment.

This is also the case, for example, in the human body, where tiny sensors and actuators requires a continuous power supply to operate.
Power tiny batteries would help solve this problem. However, the production of tiny batteries is very different from their everyday counterparts.

For example, compact batteries has a very high energy density, button cells for instance, are manufactured using pure chemistry. Electrode materials and additive (carbon materials and binders) are produced in to slurry and coated onto a metal foil.

On-chip microbatteries produced using such standard technology can produce good energy and power density but have a trace of significantly more than one milimeter.

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Stacked thin film, electrodes pillars or interdigitated microelectrodes are all used for the manufacturing of these on-chip battery. However, these designs mostly suffer from inferior energy storage and they would not be able to reduce the trace of these batteries to one square milimeter.

Current collectors and electrode strips were winded up at the microscale—a. A layered system with inherent tension was created by consecutively coating thin layers of polymeric, metallic and dielectric materials onto a wafer surface. The mechanical tension is released by peeling off the thin layers which then automatically snap back to roll up into something like a Swiss-Roll architecture form.

With this method, rechargable microbatteries are manufactured and can power the smallest computer chip in this world for ten hours non-stop.

This research team were led by Dr. Oliver G .Schmidt and Dr. Minshen Zhu.

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