World's smallest battery has been designed to power a computer the size of a grain of dust

The world's smallest battery has been designed to power a computer the size of a grain of dust, that could be used as discrete sensors, or for medical implants. 'Our results show encouraging energy storage performance at the sub-square-millimeter scale', says Dr. Minshen Zhu, study lead author A team led by Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany say these microscopic batteries are needed to power the ongoing miniaturisation of electronics The German team set a goal of creating a rechargeable battery that would hold up to 100 microwatts of energy per square centimeter, seen as the right amount for most microscopic computer uses - including measuring ambient air temperature. The German team set a goal of creating a rechargeable battery that would hold up to 100 microwatts of energy per square centimeter, seen as the right amount for most microscopic computer uses - including measuring ambient air temperature HOW IT WORKS The researchers use the so-called 'Swiss-roll' or 'micro origami' process, pioneered by Tesla at the larger scale for its electric vehicles. The current generation of microbatteries involve stacking films on a chip, but there is a limit to how small they can become before energy storage levels are too low To solve this problem, the German team created a system that involved winding up strips of the same films used in current microbatteries, that can be released and re-coiled to generate and release enough tension to power a tiny computer The mechanical tension is released by peeling off the thin layers which then automatically snap back to roll up into a Swiss-Roll architecture. Using this method, the research team has produced rechargeable microbatteries that could power the world's smallest computer chips for about ten hours - for example, to measure the local ambient temperature continuously.