Shrinking capacitors speed up development of compact next-gen electronics

Researchers have developed a way to shrink capacitors, key components that store energy, even further, which could accelerate the development of more compact, high-performance next-gen devices.

Takayoshi Sasaki and colleagues point out that many recent improvements have already downsized capacitors significantly. But current technology has almost reached its limit in terms of materials and processing, which in turn limits the performance that manufacturers can achieve.

In response, researchers have gone to the nanoscale, but "nanocapacitors" are not easy to make.

The researchers found that they could use gentle techniques and mild conditions to create a sandwich consisting of layers of two different types of oxide nanosheets to produce an ultrathin capacitor.

In addition, the new capacitor has a capacitance density about 2,000 times higher than that of commercially available products. They say that, in the future, the ultrathin capacitors could be used in printed circuit boards and in memory storage devices, for example.

The study was published in the journal ACS Nano.