A million cycles and counting

We just announced that our ultracapacitor device has withstood over 1 million charge/discharge cycles, with acceptable degradation (i.e., it has retained over 80% of its original capacitance).

This is one of the areas where ultracapacitors tend to out-perform batteries. Isidor Buchmann's book, Batteries in a Portable World, reports that the cycle life (i.e., to 80% of the battery's initial capacity) of various commercially-available batteries can range from as low as 50 cycles to 1500 depending on the chemistry (p. 29). In our investigations of microbatteries, we have seen reports of cycle lives as high as 80,000 and higher for very low power devices.

Ultracapacitors, however, have typically been much higher than batteries. 500,000 cycles is not uncommon. Many devices advertise over a million cycles.

To see ours reach this milestone is very exciting. In actual practice, it means that (considering the applications we're targeting) we're in very good shape!