EnerCera® is an ultra-compact on-board lithium-ion rechargeable battery ideally suited as a power source for IoT devices and featuring a proprietary electrode design that employs crystal-aligned ceramic plates. Despite being compact and very thin, this battery offers high capacity and low resistance. It can support currents as large as 100mA such as those required to drive ICs and sensors or wireless communications. And this battery is essential for the mass production of circuit boards as it is compatible with reflow soldering.

Ultra-compact wireless modules are the key to developing ubiquitous IoT applications, but finding a suitable power source has been recognized as the critical issue hampering full-scale deployment. But this battery represents an ideal, completely maintenance-free solution. Moreover, it was highly evaluated for making optimum use of surrounding energy (through energy harvesting) – something that was previously impossible – without environmental impact. Being a secondary (rechargeable) battery, it can be used repeatedly and has an expected life of as long as 10 years, which contributes to waste reduction. The company has employed proprietary ceramics technology to create a product that differs from the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries available today. It is expected that this will lead to the future development of the market for this new category of power-storage device.

This palm-sized smell sensor, which can be used with any object, is equipped with a sensor chip on which are mounted 20 different sensing elements, each of which has a different sensitive film coated on a thin piezoelectric film of lead zirconate titanate (PZT). When a voltage is applied to the piezoelectric film, it resonates; but when an odorant molecule attaches to the film, the resonance frequency changes. These changes are collated as numerical data. Pattern matching then enables identification of the odorant. By employing MEMS equipped with PZT piezoelectric film, it has been possible to create a compact low-cost device. Even more odorants can be identified if the number of sensing elements is increased.

It is easy to identify a smell by inputting the sensor data to the odorant-identification AI application provided by Toppan Printing. This is expected to foster new markets such as quality control (gauging maturity or detecting decay in foodstuffs) , health management (breath odor), odorant detection and related standards creation for indoor spaces (hotels, used cars, etc.), and offensive smell monitoring (in factories). Implementing such monitoring in environments such as factories where there is a possibility of odors having a negative impact on personnel can lead to improvements in the workplace environment. Furthermore, the judges were highly impressed by the fact that, by creating such a compact smell sensor, the developers had tapped into diverse market needs that had hitherto been unexplored.