CAP-XX Ltd. has demonstrated prototypes of surface-mountable supercapacitors at its Lane Cove manufacturing facility in Australia. The company developed the SMT (surface-mount technology) devices to meet customer requests for supercapacitors capable of mass production assembly using standard reflow soldering techniques.
CAP-XX engineers sent several working prototypes of the SMT supercapacitors though a reflow oven at 260°C. Before reflow, the thin, prismatic prototypes had ESRs (equivalent-series resistance) of 60 and 100mΩ, capacitances of 1.0 and 0.5 Farads, and voltage ratings of 2.75 and 5.5V, respectively. The process had only minimal impact on performance, changing the ESR and capacitance by less than 10%.
"A high-power, surface-mountable supercapacitor with the CAP-XX characteristics of a thin, small form factor has been the holy grail for the portable electronics industry, particularly mobile handsets," said Anthony Kongats, CAP-XX CEO. "The preservation of performance demonstrated in this trial meets the requirements of these customer groups."
CAP-XX is developing SMT devices to facilitate the adoption of supercapacitor-enabled power architectures in high-end feature phones and other consumer electronics devices. Current CAP-XX devices are manually soldered onto the PCB (printed-circuit board).
CAP-XX supercapacitors store charge on nanoporous carbon electrodes on aluminum foil, arranged in multiple layers and connected in parallel to minimize resistance and maximize capacitance. This packs the highest energy and power densities possible into thin (0.9 to 3.8mm), prismatic packages.
The company did not disclose expected availability for its SMT devices.
