Robert Roth
1 min readDec 23, 2023

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Perhaps. As a retired Intel engineer I have seen this story before. An engineering eco system develops constant improvement every 18 months the performance doubles which grows the market to fund the next new generation. At Intel there were actual four teams , team A1 working on a new process for old micro architectures, team A2 working on new micro architectures for the previous process improvement. Team B1 and B2 same but offset in time by 3 years. So chips with 100,000 transistors became chips with 3 billion transistors doing more but at the same price after 50 years of continuous improvement.

The battery industry is not as organized and pace of improvements slower as production ramp investment lag new battery chemistry.. However the history of 18% improvement in cost or performance has been steady.

The latest trend to high density Silicon anodes has been cooking for several years, just now producing many new production plant feeding EV vendor qualification. LFP was the last generation jump and it is continuing to improve.
It is more of a struggle for battery chemistry improvement in part because so many vendor are working on the same issues. Tesla for example proved higher density Si nano particles can improve energy density but have been struggling with dry cathode production process. 3 years and progress but not good enough.

You can review Lyten and Amprius recent introductions for a couple of data points.

There are about 20 well funded battery development project working on various chemistry and battery architectures, unique solutions for the many unique use cases.

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Robert Roth
Robert Roth

Written by Robert Roth

Retired Intel Electrical Engineer, 70's US Navy Officer Nuclear Power Program, Graduate studies in Business UC Berkeley, BSEE U of Fla.

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