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Science

Thin, Flexible Printable Battery For Smartcards 83

Posted by chrisd from the don't-hate-me-because-I'm-well-engineered dept.
cornflux writes "This would be a nice way to power a really smart smartcard: Power Paper, Ltd. has created an alkaline-like energy cell that is (among other things) thin, flexible, and "green." Furthermore, it is printable via a silk-screening process onto paper, plastic, and other flexible materials. ABCNEWS.com has the story."
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Thin, Flexible Printable Battery For Smartcards

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  • it will only work if the power per Kg is better than current

    devices only need power when pluged in so its easy to add an extra pin for power

    it will only work if it has enough for Bluetooth
    (which is made for low power devices unlike 802.11b)

    otherwise its an outside technology

    I am waiting for fuelcells
    (no dear I have not been drinking my phone smells of ethanol ;- )

    regards

    john jones
    • Bluetooth?

      It's bad enough when the salesperson takes your card outback for processing, but I sure don't want it transmitting my information to the world.
    • Why not use butane instead of ethanol for your mobile fuel cell? Then you can pop down your newsagents or gas station and buy a cigarette lighter refiller to charge your phone, more convienient than trying to find ethanol late at night on a Sunday.

      Anyway, you are taking a very narrow view: you take an invention of mass consumption and say it will only work if it can power Bluetooth??? I think rather it will only work if production is cheap enough to power musical/flashing Christmas cards (let's get realistic here).

      Phillip.
      http://www.FutureEnergies.com/
    • well, if we're going to act like we know what we are talking about we should do our homework first. batteries can be measured in ENERGY / WEIGHT but power per weight is meaningless.
  • Now my credit card won't lose it's information... oh wait, it's info is statically encoded...

    Ok, I just gotta ask, what application on/for a smartcard would use this? All smartcards I know of need a reader, and the reader usually provides the power to the smartcard for it to do it's thing... why would smartcards benifit from this? Are they going to put LCD displays on smartcards now? Thats really the only use I can think of, since every other use requires a reader anyway, so there's no point in the smartcard having a self contained power source...

    I'm very open to someone pointing out an application I may have missed, but I just can't think of anything in today's world that would need this for a smartcard... (I can think of lots of other uses for non-smartcard devices though...)
    • ...inasmuch as one of the main deterrents IMHO to more widespread use of smartcards for digital cash and suchlike is the ease with which anything on the card can be cracked. Having power onboard a smartcard would allow it to be much more resistant to physical attack than it is at present (e.g. it could detect intrusion and wipe any sensitive information).

      It also makes it much simpler to ensure the integrity of the information on the card and so simplify the programming model. (At present, the card - and any code that it runs or that it interacts with - has to gracefully handle removal of power at any time. Doing that correctly is quite tricky...)
    • All smartcards I know of need a reader, and the reader usually provides the power to the smartcard for it to do it's thing... why would smartcards benifit from this? Are they going to put LCD displays on smartcards now?
      From the ABCNEWS.com article [abcnews.com]:
      "But with a flexible battery, smart-card makers could soon include a tiny display screen on the card itself that would allow users easy access to that account data."
      So, yeah, you're on the right track with that thought.

      Another application could be two-way encrypted communication.

      • "But with a flexible battery, smart-card makers could soon include a tiny display screen on the card itself that would allow users easy access to that account data."

        Yeah, but just think about how tiny the keyboard would be!

        Also, imagine the lawsuits from the headaches it would give people. The general population isn't accustomed to reading its bank statement at a 2pt font.

        For the humor impaired, yes, the above is meant as a joke.

    • You *could* read the ABC story linked to on the site. It's not even long:

      Power Paper batteries can be used in so-called smart cards - plastic cards that contain microprocessor chips. Current smart cards require a separate bulky card reader to display the information stored on the cards' chips. But with a flexible battery, smart-card makers could soon include a tiny display screen on the card itself that would allow users easy access to that account data.

      Just a suggestion, mind.
    • The encryption engine is intensive. Probably eventually needs power if it's going to do anything useful with your (or others) keys without the help of a cardreader or a mobile phone.

      Not that I wouldn't want to slashdot on my smartcard someday.

    • Power Supply Cryptanalysis (Score:4, Interesting)

      by burris ( 122191 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @07:56PM (#2608469)
      Unfortunately, information about what the smart card is doing is leaked through the power supply [nec.com]. Giving the smartcard it's own internal power supply can help prevent power analysis attacks from the reader itself. By eliminating an input/output, the black box of the smart card can be made that much "blacker."


      burris

    • "would smartcards benifit from this? Are they going to put LCD displays on smartcards now? Thats really the only use I can think of, since every other use requires a reader anyway, so there's no point in the smartcard having a self contained power source..."

      Yip... that's what they said in the artical if someone had read it. They said that you would be able to view your account details and stuff.
      I think it's great idea. No need to go to an ATM/shop/whatever just to see how much is left.
      You might even be able to change your PIN number on it, incase you get a little paranoid 'cause of the creep behind you was whaching you type in you PIN at the check-out. Plus it couls have the usual stuff like time/date etc.

  • Levanon says the company's proprietary chemical combination -- so secretive that he calls them the "Coca-Cola formulas" -- results in battery materials that are like printer's ink.

    I'll bet these are those guys that keep calling tech support saying they spilled coke in their printer again.

  • Power/weight ratio (Score:2, Interesting)

    by vlad_petric ( 94134 )
    To produce as much power as a standard AA-sized battery, for instance, would require a Power Paper battery of about a square foot in size.

    It's pretty obvious that the power/weight ratio of this type of battery is significantly smaller than the one of a standard AA batery. More than that, the article fails to mention the exact capacity or stand-by leaking current. Which pretty much means that the average lifetime of such a battery is inferior to the one of a regular battery (if it were superior, I'm sure they would have mentioned it).

    The Raven

    • If this technology is superior, it won't take long before the material is rolled into a cylinder, much like the dielectric sandwich in capacitors, and inserted into tubes to match standard cell formats.

      However, I agree that it is more probable that we will never see the power/weight ratio approach existing technologies. What we really need is specifications on thickness and durability, which will be more relevant to the applications that may require this cell.
    • Power to size, not neccesarily power to weight. It's a square foot in size, but only half a millimeter thick - I can't imagine it weighs all that much. And batteries are heavy
  • You could use the "paper" batteries with some electro-floruscent ink, and combine with your traditional dead tree media (newspaper, mag, and textbook) and you would have some cool new ads for computer junk and illumnated text to boot. Also would be cool for maps, starcharts, and lan-party flyers.

  • Horrific Uses (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @06:57PM (#2608351) Journal
    As noted on other sites, the battery is about half a millimeter thick, and is good enough for all kinds of uses [powerpaper.com].

    The horror story in my head is that these things get cheap enough to be used to power animated and interactive displays on the boxes you see from products in department stores, etc.

    I have visions of products shouting out to you to "buy me" as you walk down the product aisles. The real world equivalent of banner ads and popup displays.

    • Banner ads maybe.
      I don't think that it would be considered a real-world equivalent of popups, because you don't have to go out of your way to "close" them
      (i.e. packaging turns motor, which in turn moves a piece of cardboard in front of you. You must push a button to make it close)
      • Be careful what you say. You never know when some marketing scumbag might be reading this, see that, and think, "Wow, what a great idea!!" Next thing you know we have cardboard boxes with popups.
        • Next thing you know we have cardboard boxes with popups.

          Well the really awful thing would be the little terribly cute voices squeelling at you, waving their little hands, shouting in their little voices, "Pick Me! Pick Me!"

          . Or just an aisle filled with a sea of animated cartons.

          • Well the really awful thing would be the little terribly cute voices squeelling at you, waving their little hands, shouting in their little voices, "Pick Me! Pick Me!"
            Or, like the gingerbread man in Shrek [imdb.com], "Eat me!" ;)
    • Front Edge Technology [frontedgetechnology.com] supposedly makes the worlds thinnest battery, however. And these are rechargeable.

      Their website has the complete specs, power dissapation curves and more.
    • I have visions of products shouting out to you to "buy me" as you walk down the product aisles. The real world equivalent of banner ads and popup displays.

      Actually, combined with current LED technologies, I'd be more afraid of people walking around with Nike(tm) video commercials on their t-shirts, and the like.
  • Before 9/11, I would have been thrilled to see something like this which could be used to improve existing security systems. (For instance, I'll be the first one to buy a SecurID-style setup that uses these things in authenticators the size and thickness of business cards - kiss replayable passwords goodbye.) However, with the ever-present push to implement a national ID card system, this technology is just another facilitator to making the USA even more of a police state.

    With traditional smart card systems, the government could force us (through "voluntary measures" of course, which would be required in airports and to drive) to carry a card that contained our biometric IDs, medical records, and discipline records from grade school. These are horribly intrusive devices, but they pale in comparison to an active, powered smartcard. Think of the possibilities: GPS tracking and reporting, for starters. How about making these cards transmit an "I'm here" signal every few seconds, so that the government knows when you're in the area? Forget tracking and triangulation on cell phones (you can turn them off) - they could force us to carry a card around with us that tells businesses and government agencies where we are, what we are doing and saying, and everything about our past.

    Think I'm paranoid? Listen to a few of Ashcroft's speeches on CNN and think again. They'd do it in a heartbeat if they could get popular support. And that won't be hard to do if we lose a couple more tall buildings.

    ~wally
    • Well, the ever-present conspiracy theory lives on Slashdot, I see. I'll assume for a moment that your theory isn't based on several layers of fallacious logic (although it is) and ask the simple question: Why?!

      Why do the people in power want such complete control and knowledge about everybody? They're subjecting themselves to the same, you understand. But what motivations do "they" have? Power? Why would "they" want power, for money? Why would "they" want money, so that "they" could buy things? But in buying things, aren't "they" just subjecting themselves to the same consumer hazards that "they" have subjected everyone else to? Whether you or Ashcroft walk into Best Buy to buy an MP3 player, under your theory, you'll both get tracked-down-and-hunted the same by the Evil CorporateOrGovernment Conspiracy.

      Suppose, instead, that this is what it's being reported as: really incredible new technology. What a concept.

      Oh, and moderators, please mod the parent post down.
    • How about making these cards transmit an "I'm here" signal every few seconds, so that the government knows when you're in the area?

      True - that would be a problem.

      Trouble is, iris recognition is on its way in. It appears to work and can be done from much greater distance than most biometric id's.

      I don't think that we will have much privacy soon anyway. Whether or not we get active smart cards.

      After all, the government doesn't really expect a terrorist to carry a tracking device at the critical time, does it?

      Michael
      • After all, the government doesn't really expect a terrorist to carry a tracking device at the critical time, does it?

        Most governmental "crime fighting measures" are so poorly designed that they intrude on honest citizens' lives, and do little to fight crime. Consider:

        • Mandatory ID cards. As if terrorists with millions of dollars can't fake them?
        • Taking guns away. As if street criminals don't already buy them on the black market?
        • Carnivore. As if a terrorist with half a brain can't use PGP?
        • Key escrow. As if terrorists won't be able to find an old copy of PGP to use?
        • Stopping curbside checkin. As if that will help stop hijackings?
        The only good Congress is a Congress that isn't passing laws (except laws that benefit techies).

        ~wally

        • Mandatory ID cards. As if terrorists with millions of dollars can't fake them?

          Actually, you don't need to fake them. None of those involved in the sept 11 bombings would have had any trouble getting a real id card - they were all in the country legally. And that isn't likely to stop. Unless you get a fortress America and stop all those foreigners from visiting under tourist visas. Then they would have to choose to emigrate to the US to get a green card, and surely they don't plan that far ahead now? :(

          Taking guns away. As if street criminals don't already buy them on the black market?

          Actually, there are much better reasons to get rid of guns, or at least lock them down a little more, but none of them have anything to do with terrorism. Mostly to do with the high likelyhood of shooting people you know in a fit of anger.

          Every first world democracy has criminals with guns and police with guns - sometimes it can be hard to tell the two apart. But only the US has the huge rate of personal injury from the guns, mostly used in defence or anger on people known to the person who uses them.

          I'm not trying to do flamebait here, I'd agree with you totally about banning guns to reduce terrorism being a stupid idea.

          Michael
  • Here's a few problems i see with this thing:
    * Not much power. 1/22 of an AA batt. wont power much for very long. even LCD screens are rather power intensive. and since it has a rather high cost, wouldnt we have to pay for replacement creditcards quite often?
    * Not rechargeable (is it?) You'd either have to replace the entire device or recharge the paper, when the batt. dies. These dont seem too replaceable, they're far too propritary/embedded

    Aside from that...I could see all kinds of fun uses for this..especialy when combined with e-ink...You could have, for example..a reuseable newspaper. Hell, make it glow while we're at it. The use this will probly be put to is however some sort of tracking system. Build a little antena into my new smartcard, and Amex can tell exactly where I am at all times. If you put it into my drivers licence, so could the goverment. Fun, aint it?

    • Lower power displays than LCDs are already in the labs.

      When they make it rechargeable, I'll be impressed. Coupled with some ultra-low power moletronics, this battery could last the next generation of CPU technology and displays all day if not far longer.

      2006 for the protoypes, I reckon...

      Vik :v)
    • Quite nice...but... one thing, does this mean that when I get my credit card out there is going to be a live streaming colour video of the bank manager waving his finger at me telling me I cant by the Logitech THX 4.1 Speakers - Z-560 from thinkgeek. Suk.
    • "Not much power. 1/22 of an AA batt. wont power much for very long. even LCD screens are rather power intensive."

      Well....I'm not sure how much power your average hearing-aid battery has compared to an AA battery. My Casio Databank can last a few years on one battery. And my caculator has lasted 5 years on 2 small ones.
      I'm sure that the intended use for devices that will use this battery won't take much power.

  • into a small cylinder, put it in your mouth, light it up and watch your cigarette consumption drop. Sure beats nicorette.

  • wearable computers... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My immediate thought on reading this was how cool it'd be to put it inside clothing for use with wearable computers...
    Then, I read the article and info on their site and had to do some thinking.
    Basically, I still think it would be good for wearables.

    Some quotes from the supplied links -

    The resulting battery is about half a millimeter thick -- the same thickness as the paper used to make milk cartons.
    Can be manufactured in any custom size or shape
    ...has developed a battery that can be printed directly onto paper, plastic or other flexible material.
    Two to three layers of this could be made into the inside lining of a bulky jacket/overcoat.

    To produce as much power as a standard AA-sized battery, for instance, would require a Power Paper battery of about a square foot in size.
    Given 2 or 3 layers in a jacket AND most of the jacket real estate being the power supply, this would be enough for a low-power computing device.

    Obviously, higher power cells or thinner cells would be neccesary to power current wearables as while they're relatively low-power devices, the display is always a major source of power drain. So, while I'm not saying anyone should go out there and do it immediately, I definitely see potential for it in the future...

    Recharging of the batteries could be accomplished using a combination of solar (thereby making the jacket look cool) and energy gained from movement (as with a few rather nifty watches out there).

    Ben de Waal. yttriumox@softhome.net

    -- Not an anonymous coward, just too lazy to create a slashdot account, I post about once a year on average, I read daily.

    • I mean really. Besides, when you have all that real estate you might as well just stick a cell-phone style Lithium-ion battery somewhere. It would work just as well, and provide a lot more power.

      besides you don't need a whole coat to achieve a 'wearable' computer would to get a PDA and plug in some headgear.

      And you're also missing the most obvious reason to electrify a coat. Keeping you warm.
    • Two to three layers of this could be made into the inside lining of a bulky jacket/overcoat.

      Some of the other problems with this:
      • If it's built into the lining of the jacket, you can't really wash it. A lot of the wearable systems involve components distributed around a vest or attached to a belt batman style. If the vest or belt needs to be washed you can remove the hardware.
      • It would only be useful where its cold and dry. I seldom wear a bulky jacket in san diego, and when i do it's because it's raining outside.


      It seems that it would really only be useful for small, flexible, probably disposable applications. Having already ripped on the idea of using it for luggage tracking, i will say that one possible use is parking permits. A hangtag with a solar cell, battery, and small readout could display up to the minute information on where you can park, when a shuttle is coming, etc. With printable display technology it might not be much more expensive than the plastic hangtags we use now (and if you thought the little hologram made them hard to duplicate...), and either way would pale in comparison to the $$ we fork over. The downside is that the permit could figure out if it was parked in the wrong spot and turn on the Parking Gestapo Beacon.

  • So how long will this battery last? It's non rechargable, and "good for low drain situations" according to the site. This would be good for many things if there was a decent battery life.

    • Re:Battery life (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Karma 50 ( 538274 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @07:53PM (#2608459) Homepage
      If my maths is right - 25 hours at standard drain

      http://www.powerpaper.com/tech/technology.html

      Nominal current 0.1 mA/cm2
      Capacity 2.5 mAh/cm2

      Shelf life is 2.5 years.

      So between 1 day and 2.5 years depending on usage.
      • That's not too bad, then, for small apps.
        I can't take over the world with it yet, but just you wait...BWAHahaaaaaaaaa......
        No but seriously, as an artist, stuff like this is fascinating, it leads to all sorts of artistic "hacks". The possibilities are exciting.
  • Wasn't the point of the patent to prevent companies from keeping scientific knowledge secret? According to this guy, the chemical formula is closely guarded. Does this mean they didn't get a patent? I can't imagine it would be very hard to just analyze a battery to see what it was made of.

    • Re:patent issues.. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Karma 50 ( 538274 )
      They have a patent. 5,897,522 [uspto.gov].

      The patent seems to be for a mechanism for allowing the escape of gases produced by the generation.

      They give some examples of chemicals in the patent application and the chemistry of batteries of old technology, there are probably a number of different solutions that could be used.

      They could be protecting the exact chemicals used just because they're an efficient set to use, not because they're the only ones which work; and the real invention is making the whole thing practical and long-lasting.

  • "Smart" Luggage Tags? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cosyne ( 324176 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @08:03PM (#2608475) Homepage
    Power Paper even envisions that its flexible battery designs can be used to help secure airports and passengers. Luggage tags and airline tickets could be printed with tiny radio antennas and circuitry -- powered by the company's battery -- to contain passenger data.

    Great. Please make sure you seatbacks and traytables are in their full upright and locked positions, all you carryon items have been safely stowed in an overhead bin or under the seat in front of you, and all cellular phones, portable electronics, and luggage tags have been turned off prior to departure.

    Not to mention it's a stupid idea anyway. The tages the airlines put on your bag already have barcodes- if getting them to point in the right direction for the laser scanner is just too difficult, they can easily use RFID (who says they don't already?). There's no reason to have the tag carry a battery unless it's going to display and update information in realtime.
    • The tags the airlines put on your bag already have barcodes- if getting them to point in the right direction for the laser scanner is just too difficult, they can easily use RFID (who says they don't already?). There's no reason to have the tag carry a battery unless it's going to display and update information in realtime.

      I read some articles about RFID tags and air lines use them already. It's after all faster to read them in a tunnel then pointing a laser at them. Those tags turn and bend and RF is much better at reading the ID.

      The benefit of a passive RFID tag is it's cheap. The drawback is, the maximum reading distance is rather small (some meters).

      Active, power driven ID tagscan send out their ID much further away. Given enough power, several hundred meters.

      Now that makes it useless for air lines (at least I cannot see a reason why they would like to do that), but for other services it might be useful. Containers in a harbour/shipping station come into my mind. They are too big to put into a tunnel, but they can carry a small battery without any problems.

      This small printed battery thing now makes this battery small, flat, flexible and cheap, which means this active RFID tags can be deployed in more articles.

      After all, you don't have to use them and passive ones will be cheaper anyway, so it's just one more choice you have.

      Sounds ok for me.

      • Anti-theft/inventory management tags, too. Rather than having obvious and potentially bypassed detectors on the doors, the tags can broadcast a signal thats triangulated by recievers. If it's outside the store, then an alarm goes off. Of course, battery life would have to be pretty darn good.. *hrm*
  • One reason that ebooks haven't taken off yet is that it's rather cumbersome, carrying your laptop all over creation just to read a book. Using this as a power source, and a single-page lcd screen, you might just have an ebook that was portable enough to carry around like a regular paperback.

    The battery is replaceable, and it shouldn't be hard to download different texts into it... or, maybe, store the texts on a novram card. Sell whole textbooks like this, and make it easier for students to carry the whole load.

    These paper batteries could easily be used, whereas conventional batteries are rather heavy and bulky, still.

  • TFM? (Score:1)

    by jpmkm ( 160526 )
    Could anyone tell me what TFM stands for? I didn't catch it from the article.
  • I spend most of my on-the-job time working on various smart card projects. Having an internal power source could help in the race to stay ahead of differential power analysis attacks in which the keys can be extracted from a card by monitoring/varying the power supplied to it. It could also significantly increase the range of contactless cards.

    However the pages that I read lacked a phrase that I was looking for: ISO 7816 Compliant. This is the specification that dictates the characteristics of a smart card. The flexibility, durability, and size of the card are dictated. This is important because these cards need to be able to live for years in people's wallets and occasionally even be used to scrape ice off of car windshields. :) And if a card with this battery is ISO 7816 compliant, then Power Paper should really mention it. If not, then they need to work on it before it will gain market acceptance. Phrases such as "highly flexible" just won't cut it if it isn't compliant.

  • I see wearable power sources, such as layers in the bill of a hat, layers of a necktie or bowtie, or 3V batteries as cufflinks (done w/ flashing LEDs).

    Cowboy hats (perhaps 10 gallon) will go from hick (or chic) to geek real fast if they can supply more power than a baseball cap. Keep in mind that hats do not have to be as flexible as regular clothes.

  • Interesting idea. Well covered by /.ers.
    My $0.02 to toss into the ring is e-books, one-use disposable books the size of a credit card. once the battery runs out, its time to buy another copy of Lord of the Rings.

    On second thought, I hope no deadtree publishers read this comment...
  • Surely the energy stored in a battery is proportional to the volume of electrolyte, so batteries which are excessively thin will not have a long life, and will have to be very 'wide' to make up the volume. The width would have to be disproportionately increased to make up the volume.
  • So let me ask -- what do you do with the smart card when the battery runs out? Throw it away? That kind of defeats the purpose of the smart card as a security/storage device.
  • I cringed when I saw the line that these batteries are environmentally safe. Sure, the actual batter might be, and the manufacturing processes might be as well. But encouraging people to use lots of short-lived, nonbiodegradeable devices and then toss them out sure isn't! And that ignores whether the rest of the products they're encouraging people to (eventually) use these in are environmentally friendly.
  • good, a replacement energy. My body was becoming ressistant to cafeine

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