ITEN is a French industrial company developing and manufacturing micro-batteries. It is a privately held company created in 2011.
Its headquarter is located nearby Lyon (France) and hosts a production plant of # 1500m².
ITEN develops its own materials and processes used in the manufacture of the micro-batteries and owns more than 100 patents granted worldwide covering its technology.
ITEN’s batteries are indeed rechargeable solid-state micro-batteries delivered in the form of Surface Mounted Device (SMD).
These micro-batteries are really compact and fit within a volume of # 10-15 mm3; their form factors can be easily customized by changing the area and the thickness of the battery which can be less than 300 µm if necessary.
What is unique in these micro-batteries is that they obviously behave like a battery at 2,5V but they are also able to deliver power and high peak currents,: as an example, a rechargeable micro-battery of 250 to 500 µA.h is able to deliver peak currents of around 175 to 350 mA, which is more than enough to power up any RF transmission for instance like Bluetooth and Sigfox. This is due to the fact that all our micro-batteries have very low internal resistance; this also explains why these micro-batteries do recharge very quickly: 75-80% of the charge is reached in less than 5 minutes.
They withstand more than 2000 cycles at 75% Depth of Discharge. Their typical operating temperature range is as broad as -40°C +85°C, if necessary. Because they are fully solid and do contain neither Lithium metal nor organic solvents , they are totally safe (no risk of explosion) and easy to recycle like any other SMD components. Because they are SMD, they can be assembled in standard automated assembly lines (pick and place, reflow soldering ).
These micro-batteries are typically used to back-up RTC, microcontrollers and memories, or in self-powered wireless sensor nodes. They can be used in a lot of other applications:
- To store energy collected from energy harvesters (photovoltaics, vibrations) and deliver the required power to RF transmitters;
- To power-assist primary batteries and deliver the power to boost any RF communication (Bluetooth, ISM, Zigbee and Sigfox)
Because they remove a lot of paint points (size, power, safety, easy assembly and recycling) and because of their operating temperature range and very fast charging capabilities, these micro-batteries do also open totally new use cases in the industrial and consumer IoT market.