Gen-Zero – a new generation of Smoltek’s carbon nanofiber capacitors

Dur­ing 2023 group com­pa­ny Smoltek Semi has worked on devel­op­ing a new tech­nol­o­gy gen­er­a­tion of the com­pa­ny’s CNF-MIM capac­i­tors with high vol­u­met­ric capac­i­tance den­si­ty. Gen-Zero, as it is called, has recent­ly been com­plet­ed as part of the col­lab­o­ra­tion with YAGEO, with Smoltek Semi own­ing all rights to the result.

Although we have cur­rent­ly con­clud­ed dis­cus­sions regard­ing a license and ser­vice agree­ment for the capac­i­tors, YAGEO still has a great inter­est in our tech­nol­o­gy and will help us eval­u­ate the results of upcom­ing Gen-One capacitors. 

Farzan Gha­vani­ni, CTO at Smoltek.

Smoltek has devel­oped a new tech­nol­o­gy gen­er­a­tion of the com­pa­ny’s CNF-MIM capac­i­tors that enables a pow­er­ful increase in the capac­i­tance den­si­ty in capacitors.

Håkan Pers­son, CEO

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.

Smoltek’s tech­nol­o­gy dif­fers from com­peti­tors’, which etch deep trench­es, or holes, in the sil­i­con sub­strate. To fair­ly eval­u­ate the two tech­nolo­gies, one must look at the vol­u­met­ric capac­i­tance den­si­ty. This means that you must com­pare how much capac­i­tance you can get in a giv­en vol­ume in a CNF-MIM capac­i­tor com­pared to that of the competitors.

Farzan Gha­vani­ni

With the new Gen-Zero capac­i­tors, Smoltek can cre­ate a vol­u­met­ric capac­i­tance den­si­ty of up to 120 nano­farads per square mil­lime­ter and per 1 microm­e­ter of car­bon nanofiber. This is com­pa­ra­ble to the best capac­i­tors on the mar­ket. The capac­i­tance val­ues in the Gen-Zero capac­i­tors are, how­ev­er, low­er than the com­peti­tors. This is due to the fact that Smoltek Semi has not yet opti­mized the length of the fibers. The car­bon nanofibers in Gen-Zero are only a few of microm­e­ters tall. In the next gen­er­a­tion, Gen-One, the ambi­tion is to grow longer car­bon nanofibers, up to 10 microm­e­ters tall, which is expect­ed to bring the capac­i­tance val­ues on par with the competitors.

Although we can pro­vide a very high vol­u­met­ric capac­i­tance den­si­ty, there is still work to be done to reach our full poten­tial. The ongo­ing Gen-One project will already dur­ing this year prove the strength and poten­tial of our tech­nol­o­gy to cre­ate a world-lead­ing capac­i­tor prod­uct. And, as I said, YAGEO’s tech­ni­cal inter­est in our CNF-MIM tech­nol­o­gy remains, and we will work very close­ly togeth­er in eval­u­at­ing the upcom­ing Gen-One capacitors.

Farzan Gha­vani­ni