Gen-One – next generation of Smoltek’s carbon nanofiber capacitors

The Gen-One capac­i­tors are based on a nov­el approach in con­vert­ing a car­bon nanofiber for­est into a high capac­i­tance den­si­ty capac­i­tor. This approach uti­lizes the valu­able foot­print area of the capac­i­tor more effi­cient­ly while keep­ing the par­a­sitic induc­tance and resis­tance at a min­i­mum. This, com­bined with the expect­ed increase in the length of the car­bon nanofibers will be a leap for­ward com­pared to the Gen-Zero CNF-MIM capac­i­tors.

The Gen-Zero capac­i­tors was devel­oped togeth­er with Yageo, one of the biggest capac­i­tors man­u­fac­tur­ers in the world. The capac­i­tor tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment col­lab­o­ra­tion between Smoltek Semi and Yageo Group will con­tin­ue, although Yageo has paused the dis­cus­sions on an exclu­sive license and ser­vice agree­ment, and they will assist in the test­ing and eval­u­a­tion of our upcom­ing Gen-One capac­i­tors that are under development.

High capac­i­tance in a small area – and the impor­tance of vol­u­met­ric capac­i­tance den­si­ty
Smoltek’s car­bon nanofiber-based capac­i­tor tech­nol­o­gy, CNF-MIM, cre­ates high capac­i­tance val­ues by grow­ing extreme­ly thin and tall car­bon nanofibers on top of a sil­i­con sub­strate. With this tech­nol­o­gy, a very high capac­i­tance is cre­at­ed in a very small area. This is fun­da­men­tal and demand­ed from the capac­i­tor man­u­fac­tur­ers and their cus­tomers worldwide.

With the new tech­nol­o­gy gen­er­a­tion, Smoltek can cre­ate a vol­u­met­ric capac­i­tance den­si­ty of up to 120 nano­farads per square mil­lime­ter, and per microm­e­ter of car­bon nanofiber. This is com­pa­ra­ble to the top capac­i­tors on the mar­ket. How­ev­er, the capac­i­tance val­ues in the Gen-Zero capac­i­tors were today low­er than the com­peti­tors. This is because we have not yet opti­mized the length of the car­bon nanofibers, which in Gen-Zero were only a few microm­e­ters long. In the next gen­er­a­tion, Gen-One, the ambi­tion is to grow car­bon nanofibers that are up to 10 microm­e­ters long, which is expect­ed to enable capac­i­tance val­ues on par with the competition.

Farzan Gha­vani­ni