Chemnitz University of Technology

The lack of an on-chip power source providing uninterrupted energy impedes the progress of smart dust in moving from lab-level demonstrations to everyday applications. Tiny generators relying on external energy sources face spatial and temporal limitations. Batteries with adequate energy are not available in an area of less than 1 mm2, and the reasons for their absence are manifold. Mainstream battery architectures require either thick or tall electrodes created by etching into the wafer, but it is very fiddly to deposit materials onto these electrodes without defects. High-capacity materials such as lithium cobalt oxide, sulfur and lithium metal are often excluded because on-chip techniques to synthesize or stabilize such materials are missing. Moreover, a low-power monitor to provide precise information about the energy storage state and battery health is essential for real applications but unexplored so far. These difficulties demand a paradigm shift in microbattery development to pursue novel approaches that offer energy-dense microbatteries integrable into microsystems. Therefore, we propose a micro-origami technology for on-chip microbatteries using aqueous zinc battery chemistry, together with embedded surveillance based on a non-volatile redox transistor with near-zero power consumption. SMADBINS is expected to bring advances in battery chemistry and materials and on-chip energy production and management, boosting research for microbattery and smart dust applications, as was recently highlighted by the PI [Nature, 2021, 589, 195]. The PI has decisively contributed to the field of aqueous microbatteries and developed the smart dust battery concept together with his team in several publications. However, a smart dust battery has not been achieved yet. Therefore, the main objective of this project is to develop the first smart dust battery embedded with a low-power monitor, which attains a footprint capacity of more than 10 mAh/cm2 within 1 mm2.

Infertility is a health issue with sociological and psychological implications that affects approximately 50 million couples worldwide and therefore receives global attention. Among fertility issues, male infertility is diagnosed in about 40% of all cases and the major causes are poor motility of spermatozoa (asthenospermia), low sperm count (oligospermia), abnormal sperm morphology (teratospermia) and/or combinations of these, leading to their inability to fertilize an oocyte. Such problems have been mainly addressed by artificial insemination (AI) and in vitro fertilization (IVF). AI involves introducing sperms into a woman’s uterus with a medical instrument, but its applicability is limited and its success rate is below 30%. In contrast, IVF and intracytoplasmic sperm injection can be more effective but implicate more invasive procedures such as removing oocytes from a woman’s ovaries, fertilize them outside of the body and then transfer the embryos back to the uterus a few days later. These difficulties demand rethinking of assisted fertilization and the sought after novel approaches that offer more natural procedures with high success rate. Hence, we propose untethered medical microbots to assist sperm cells to fertilize an oocyte in living organisms (mice model). The MicroRepro project will bring advances in areas such as bioimaging, nanomaterials science and fundamental biology, boosting the whole field of medical microbots in the process, as was recently highlighted by the PI in an extended comment [Nature 545, 406(2017)]. The PI has decisively contributed to the field of microrobotics and invented the sperm-robot (Spermbot) concept together with his team in two previous patent applications and several publications. The mere concept has attracted worldwide attention. However, even in vitro fertilization has never been achieved – therefore, targeting the challenges leading to the first spermbot fertilization will be the main objective of this project.