When the trio of Samsung Galaxy Z 8 foldables — the Galaxy Z Fold 8, Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, and Galaxy Z Flip 8 — arrive in consumers’ hands in the coming weeks, they will be among the first mainstream handsets, aside from the Motorola Razr Fold, to feature silicon-carbon batteries. That’s a big deal for the industry, but perhaps an even bigger deal with Samsung, which, a decade ago, had one of the biggest negative smartphone battery stories in a generation.
That was way back in 2016 when the Note 7, an otherwise excellent phablet (yes, that was a thing), occasionally blew up because of battery manufacturing imperfections. Ever since then, Samsung has not only had a perfect record; it’s often been at pains to explain the lengths it goes to ensure smartphone battery stability and safety.
Now, as it introduces a relatively new and somewhat untested battery technology — silicon-carbon — Samsung is again making the effort to dive deep into the construction and chemistry of these new-fangled power sources to show just how much care and effort it’s putting into the new tech, and into its new foldable phones.
What is silicon-carbon?
Silicon-carbon is not a wholesale refashioning of lithium-ion battery technology. Instead, it replaces a key component of the battery makeup, swapping the negative electrode (graphite) for silicon-carbon. This material allows for higher density (more power in less space) and far faster charging speeds. It’s part of the reason why Samsung can, despite not making the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra any thicker than the Z Fold 7 (it’s actually 0.1mm thinner when unfolded), make the battery larger — it’s now 5,000mAh.
With Samsung now having a solid decade of battery safety under its belt, perhaps no one is questioning the quality, let alone the safety, of this new battery technology. But Samsung clearly wants to shout about it, and has been sharing extensive details.
In a recent briefing ahead of the July 22 Galaxy Unpacked event in London, Samsung executives walked us through a near-atomic-level chemistry class to explain how it’s custom-building the silicon-carbon batteries to ensure they work as expected.
“With Samsung’s highest standards, we carefully verified the silicon-carbon battery so that our users can trust it and use it with competence,” said Samsung EVP Moon Sung-hoon.
As for what that means, Samsung told us it fully redesigned the cathode, separator, and anode, which means that, at an atomic level, Samsung is managing the chemical reaction inside the battery that delivers the power to your next Galaxy Z Fold device.
Samsung wouldn’t share the exact amount of silicon-carbon that’s in the batteries, but it did confirm that its new Z Fold 8 Ultra, Z Fold 8, and Z Flip 8 phones in every region would feature the new battery technology.
On coatings and voltage management
Even though we didn’t learn the percentage of each battery element in the Galaxy Z8 phones, Samsung dove deep into the component construction, explaining that, in an effort to manage the reactivity of the silicon-carbon cells, it “innovated every single part of the battery system. This is why we call it the system level of innovation at battery.”
A Samsung executive showed off a colorful illustration to detail all the work (sadly, I cannot share it with you here). But here’s what I learned.
To the anode layer, Samsung’s engineers added a micro-carbon coating, which offers protection to the layer without, thanks to carbon’s natural pores, constricting it during charging and discharging,
On the cathode layer, they “injected additional atoms” to manage the naturally higher voltage and stability of the cells. To maintain that higher voltage, they added a solid electrolyte interface (SEI) that adds a “small coating to the anode cells”. This also manages the cell reactivity.
Finally, for the chemical reaction that occurs in the battery, Samsung added a “hyperporosity separator,” which has larger holes without reducing the stress or durability of the cell’s separators, and therefore helps maintain stability.
While most of us non-chemical engineers might feel like we’ve just about wrapped our minds around this information, this is an unprecedented level of battery construction detail, which I don’t think Samsung would have shared if not for its history with batteries.
For consumers, though, this may not matter as much as the fact that these are larger-capacity batteries in smaller frames that charge far faster than their predecessors — and that will feel like a win for most Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, Z Fold 8, and Z Flip 8 owners.
For our early impressions of all three new phones, check out our hands-on Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra preview, hands-on Galaxy Z Fold 8 preview, and hands-on Galaxy Z Flip 8 preview.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
