A team at KAIST in South Korea reports that a semiconductor fabrication technique can calm the lithium deposits that wear out one of the most promising next-generation battery designs. Professors Jinwoo Lee and Hee-Tae Jung, both of KAIST’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, patterned copper foil with tiny tubes about 300 nanometers wide and then coated it with a layer of MXene roughly 10 nanometers thick. The result so far is a laboratory finding about battery lifespan, with no production cell and no commercial timeline attached.
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The design problem starts with what battery makers call the anode. Conventional lithium-ion cells use graphite there, which adds weight and takes up room. An anode-free cell drops the graphite and lets lithium plate directly onto bare copper foil during charging, which saves space and mass. The catch is that lithium does not always plate smoothly. Over repeated cycles it grows needle-like spikes called dendrites, and the thin protective film that forms on the metal keeps breaking and re-forming, consuming lithium each time and shortening the life of the cell.
Tubes made with secondary sputtering lithography
According to the ScienceDaily report on the work, Lee, Jung and co-first authors Eunji Kim, Hyunju Jung and Jinuk Kim used a method called secondary sputtering lithography, a technique borrowed from semiconductor manufacturing. It etches repeating nanoscale structures into a surface with very tight control. On the copper foil it produced tube patterns about 300 nanometers wide and 150 nanometers tall, which raises the usable surface area to roughly four times that of flat foil. Collaborators at Kyungpook National University and the National NanoFab Center took part in the project.
The idea is to give lithium many evenly spaced places to land instead of letting it pile up wherever the foil happens to be rough.
The second ingredient is the MXene coating, a two-dimensional material applied about 10 nanometers thick. In a lithium hexafluorophosphate electrolyte, a common formulation in lithium-ion cells, it encourages a protective layer rich in lithium fluoride to form. The researchers characterized the interface with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry and transmission electron microscopy, handling samples so they were not exposed to air. Lee said the ultrafine fabrication techniques used in semiconductor manufacturing can create uniform lithium deposition sites and a stable protective layer.
Even lithium plating on the patterned MXene foil
The team found that lithium deposited more evenly on the patterned, coated foil, which reduced the spikes that trigger trouble. A nanoscale protective layer formed uniformly on the MXene surface, which limited side reactions between the metal and the electrolyte and slowed dendrite growth. Cell lifespan improved as a result. Notably, the gains came without extra lithium, thicker coatings or changes to the electrolyte, three of the workarounds earlier studies leaned on and which add weight or cost.
The work was published online on September 1, 2026, in Advanced Functional Materials as “Anion-Interactive Anode Interfaces for Stable Anode-Free Lithium Metal Batteries.” It was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea through its Nano&Material Technology Development Program, along with the Ministry of Science and ICT and National NanoFab Center projects. The paper’s DOI page did not load during research for this article, so the details here come from the KAIST-sourced summary rather than the full text.
From lifespan to range, and what remains unproven
The link from this result to driving range is indirect, and it is worth stating plainly. The measured improvement is in how long an anode-free cell survives repeated charging. Range comes into play because an anode-free design, if it can be made durable, packs more energy into less weight and volume, which could allow smaller and lighter packs or more capacity in the same space. The KAIST group says the approach could help accelerate commercial development of such batteries and calls it a promising step. It does not claim a finished range figure.
Several gaps remain before any car could use the idea. The reports describe small laboratory cells rather than full-size automotive packs. Patterning copper foil with semiconductor lithography at the scale of a battery factory, which turns out kilometers of foil, is a very different manufacturing problem from etching a wafer, and nothing in the coverage gives a cost or throughput estimate. Independent labs have not yet been reported repeating the result, and the full cycle counts and conditions sit in the paper itself.
Other outlets have framed the study more boldly. SciTechDaily and Interesting Engineering both carried versions that lean toward longer-range electric vehicles, but the underlying finding is the narrower one reported by KAIST: a more uniform lithium deposit and a steadier protective film on a nanostructured, MXene-coated foil.
The open question is whether the benefit survives scale. Lee and Jung’s group has shown, in a peer-reviewed paper funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea, that semiconductor-grade patterning can tame lithium deposition in the lab. Whether a foil maker can reproduce those tubes cheaply, and whether a full cell holds its lifespan gains over thousands of cycles, is the data the next round of experiments will have to supply.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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