A hierarchical approach for the fabrication of three-dimensional microbattery electrodes

The first successful demonstration of virus-structured, hierarchical electrodes for three-dimensional (3-D) Li-ion microbattery architectures is reported in this paper. The electrodes consist of electroplated gold micropillars and virus-structured nanocomposite materials with a TiO₂ anode layer deposited on a nickel-coated viral template. Micropatterning increases the active electrode surface area and electrochemical characterization results verify an improvement in microbattery capacity by up to a factor of four compared to nanostructures alone.