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!

One more thing about patents . . .

Intellectual property, of course, is a vital part of our business. And the patent process in the United States has some real issues.

In an earlier post (and the posts on this blog are a LOT earlier -- I'll try to improve our posting frequency) I menioned that some patents are taking as long as three years to grind their way through the system.

Well, I may have understated the problem.

At least one compay we've been following (NanoGram) filed a patent in June 2000 that covered using certain kinds of nanoparticles in batteries. Their patent was issued in May 2007 -- almost 7 years later!

I'm don't think this is typical, but it certainly can be looked at as a symptom of the backlog and (probably) staffing needs at the US Patent Office.