In November 2025, a research team led by Professor Hu Weijin at the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, developed a "flash annealing" process with heating and cooling rates reaching 1,000 degrees Celsius per second. This process can prepare lead zirconate-based relaxor antiferroelectric thin films on silicon wafers in just one second. The technology can "freeze" the high-temperature special structure of materials at room temperature, forming nanodomains smaller than 3 nanometers while making the film structure denser and more uniform, thereby locking in volatile lead elements. The resulting capacitors achieve an energy storage density of 63.5 joules per cubic centimeter. Moreover, after extreme temperature cycling from -196°C to 400°C, the attenuation in energy storage density and efficiency is less than 3%, making it suitable for extreme environments such as outer space exploration and underground oil and gas exploration. Currently, the team can prepare uniform thin films on 2-inch silicon wafers, providing an industrially feasible solution for chip-level integrated energy storage.

Breakthroughs and Significance of This Technology  

• Disrupting Traditional Processes: Traditional material annealing processes typically take tens of minutes or even hours, while "flash annealing" shortens this to just one second, significantly improving production efficiency and reducing energy consumption.

• Achieving "Structural Freezing": This is the core scientific innovation. Many materials exhibit excellent properties at high temperatures, but their structures change upon cooling to room temperature, causing the properties to disappear. This technology acts like a "snapshot," preserving the ideal high-temperature structure and thus enabling unprecedented material performance at room temperature.

• Solving Material Science Challenges:

• Controlling Nanodomains: The 3-nanometer domain structure is key to achieving high-performance dielectric and antiferroelectric properties, which are difficult to control precisely with traditional methods.

• Suppressing Element Volatilization: For materials containing volatile elements like lead, prolonged heat treatment can lead to compositional deviations and performance degradation. The ultrafast process perfectly addresses this issue.

• Pioneering a New Path for "Chip-Level Energy Storage":

• This technology directly prepares high-performance energy storage thin films on silicon wafers, meaning capacitors can be integrated directly into or alongside chips in the future.

• This will fundamentally change the power supply methods of electronic devices, enabling more compact, efficient, and responsive "on-chip power management." It holds revolutionary significance for artificial intelligence chips, high-performance computing, portable electronic devices, and more.

Application Prospects  

• Electronic Devices for Extreme Environments:

• Outer Space Exploration: Capable of withstanding extremely low temperatures in space and transient high temperatures inside spacecraft.

• Underground Oil and Gas Exploration: Suitable for high-temperature and high-pressure environments deep underground.

• Next-Generation Power Electronics: Providing high-power-density, high-stability energy storage components for electric vehicles, rail transit, and other fields.

• Advanced Integrated Circuits: Serving as embedded capacitors to deliver instantaneous high currents for microprocessors, memory chips, and others, enhancing computational performance and stability.

In summary, the "flash annealing" technology developed by the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, is not only a breakthrough in material preparation processes but also opens up a new path for the deep integration of high-performance energy storage components with semiconductor chips. This positions China at the forefront of the high-end electronic materials and devices field.