 Good morning from Stanford University. My name is Will Chu. I'm the faculty co-director of the Storage X initiative. I would like to welcome everyone back to the Storage X symposium. We took a short break from the end of June. And now we're ready to start our summer series for another exciting season. And together with my colleague Itui, we are delighted to welcome our first speaker for the summer series. Over the past year, we have had the pleasure of hosting a number of our outstanding alumni in the seminar series starting with Stan Wintingham, and then JB Straubel and Drew Ponick. And today we're so pleased to welcome a fourth alumni to our speaker, to our Storage X symposium series. Tim Holm, who is the CTO of QuantumScape, was a physics and mechanical engineering student many years ago at Stanford. And for the past decade, he has been working tremendously hard to realize solid-state battery technology. It is a great honor for us to host him today and then to kick off the summer series. Let me invite Yi to also say a few remarks as well. Well, thank you, Will. I would like to also add my welcome to everybody to come back to our summer series around the world. Certainly welcome back virtually, Tim. I remember meeting you while you were a student in Professor Fritz Prinze Lab, you know, working hard on a new concept of energy storage, winning the RPE proposal. I'm so glad to see, since then, that really turned into a really exciting journey, leading to formation of QuantumScape, you as a co-founder and CTO. And taking into a direction of solid-state batteries. Certainly we have seen in the past year also of the commercial activity and the public market space, how exciting that is, everybody talk about it. Today is a great honor to have you coming back virtually to share with us the greatest and latest. With that, Tim, I will pass the podium to you. And welcome back. Great. Well, thanks so much for inviting me. It is an honor. It's been a great way to start Friday mornings by watching this symposium. So it's nice to be able to come here and share what I've been up to and come back to campus, at least virtually. And I'll be talking today about the status of QuantumScape's development of solid-state batteries with lithium metal inodes. And I'll just start off with a few words about the company, for those of you who are so familiar with QuantumScape. So we were founded in 2010. We've been around for more than 10 years. As many of you on the call will appreciate, developing new battery technology is very difficult. We have over 300 million dollars and we have over 400 employees at this point in over 10 years. So it's been a long journey. We're certainly not done yet. Up to this point, we've generated a lot of IP along the way. We have over 200 patents and applications, as well as a lot of trade secrets. And then just one other highlight about the company is I think one of the things that's really enabled us to get to this point is a deep partnership we've had with Volkswagen since 2012 or so. They've been really, really key, not just in funding, but also in supporting us as we develop the technology. I think there are a few categories of customers we could have. There are some who say, you know, it's an interesting product, but maybe not for us. There might be others who would say, wow, that's a really fascinating idea for a battery, you know, come to us when the development is done and would like to test it. And then there are others like Volkswagen who have said, that's really so interesting, so compelling that we want to help you bring this to market. And we help. So it's been great to have their partnership over time. We've got a very strong management team. I'll just say a few words about some folks. Not only am I an alumni but my other co-founders, Professor Fritz Prins and Jake Deep Singh are also alumni of Stanford. You know, it's a really strong team all around. I'll just highlight two other recent additions. As we scale towards pilot land and manufacturing, we are starting to grow the manufacturing team. So we've, we've added some more talent from the semiconductor and battery industry. And Selena will be familiar to some of you on this audience because she talked several months ago when she was in her capacity at Panasonic, she's now joined us. So let's talk a little bit about the problem that we set out to solve at QuantumScape. It was really to, to help the transition of the car fleet to an automotive electric vehicle car fleet. So there are about 100 million vehicles sold in the world every year. And still to this day only a small fraction about 3% of them are plug-in hybrids or fully electric cars. So it's an ambition to make not just an incrementally better battery that could help address this small fraction of the early adopter market, but to really close the gap between lithium ion batteries and combustion engine cars and enable electrification to take over in the mass market. So to do that, we believe that batteries need to improve on five metrics that are important to consumers and drivers of cars. First is in the range of the car. You know, we've all heard about range anxiety. So we think that certainly in the US, you need to get to 300 mile range or so to be compelling. And that requires a battery with higher energy density. So there will be some consumers who, you know, can can charge their car in their garage overnight and don't need fast charge. But then to get past those early adopters to the whole market, you need to address the people who expect to go on road trips on the weekends, and need fast charge to go on longer road trips, or who don't live in a house with access to a charging station in their garage, maybe they live in an apartment building or something like that. So fast charge to close the gap to how fast it is to refill with gasoline, I think is a requirement. In terms of costs, the single biggest line item of the cost of an electric vehicle is the battery itself. And so if you're going to get to the mass market price point of low cost cars, you need low cost batteries as well. In terms of lifetime, the battery should last the life of the car, which is, you know, 1215 years, lots of miles as well. And then in terms of safety, you'd like to take at least no steps backwards relative to lithium ion and hopefully improve safety there as well. Now, of course, the energy source that is required to drive a car means you're going to store a lot of energy. It takes a lot of energy to drive a car. So there's always a risk of that energy getting released in certain ways. But you would like it, like it to be as safe as possible given that given that you have to store a lot of energy. So these are really the five key metrics that we set out to try and improve on. And in batteries, one thing that's very hard is balancing these metrics. They'll all sort of trade off against each other. So one concrete example is energy and power, right, you can make an energy cell with thick electrodes that has lower power or you could make those electrodes thinner and get more power at the expense of energy. One trade off, but many of these metrics trade off against each other. And so one of the things that's very hard batteries is to improve on all metrics simultaneously. So I'll talk a little bit more about how we're, we're attempting to do that. So I think you all will be familiar with lithium ion batteries. This is schematic on the left, showing the graphite or graphite and silicon anode, the porous separator, the cathode material like a lithium cobalt oxide example, and then the current collectors that carry heat and electrons out of the cell. What what I'd like to highlight, even for those of you familiar with batteries is how much the anode is responsible for some of these limitations along the five key metrics that I mentioned earlier. In terms of energy. Well, as you can see from this graphic which is drawn roughly to scale, you know the anode is consuming quite a lot of space and therefore mass in the cell. In terms of fast charge, well, especially at low temperatures but even at modest or room temperature one of the limitations to be able to charge the battery quickly is the distance that lithium ions have to travel through this liquid electrolyte to get throughout the particle and then to diffuse into the graphite particles, and then you know one of the risks and fast charge especially as you get towards higher states of charge is that as the graphite particles get near full. The lithium could start to plate on the outside of the graphite particle rather than interpolate inside the particle itself. And so when that lithium plates on the outside that damages the life of the cell and a couple of ways. So first of all, it'll hurt the columnic efficiency, because some of that lithium will react with the liquid electrolyte to form the SCI layer. And second, because you could actually form dendrites where lithium would grow these bossy or dendritic structures penetrate through the separator and bridge to the cathode, and at which point the battery fails. And so the anode is also responsible for some of the fast charge limitations. In terms of cost, well it, you know, it costs money to buy the active materials to deposit them. And then also in the formation cycle. You know what what's called this formation process, what you're forming predominantly is the anode SCI, the solid electrolyte interface that forms on the surface of the graphite particles. The formation and aging process is one of the most cost-intensive parts of battery manufacturing. It can take weeks to form and age the battery. These are weeks after the battery is made when it's in its highest value state that you have to as a battery manufacturer just carry his inventory on your shelves and run through cyclers to test them. And that's an attribute to cost as well. In terms of lifetime, it turns out one of them made sources of capacity fade in a battery. One of the main reasons why your phone doesn't last as long today is when you bought it. Sorry. One of the main reasons that battery capacity fades is this SCI growth continues as the battery ages. And each cycle as the graphite expands and contracts this SCI can crack and then regrow, which consumes electrolyte and lithium from the cell. And then in terms of safety, well, this liquid electrolyte and the polymer separator graphite material are all flammable components. So they all store energy that isn't useful energy that can be used to drive the car, but store energy that could be released in the form of a fire if the car gets in a crash. So really the anode contributes to all five of these metrics that would be important. So then this chart is one adapted from a study that BMW did, did several years ago where they were looking at next generation chemistry use. And what is their potential in terms of cell energy density waters per kilogram on the y axis here. So they looked at more conventional cathode materials like nickel rich and MCNNCA and across a spectrum of what what they thought was the most promising next generation cathode materials and sort of modeled out the energy density that you can get with any of these cathode materials. What you can see is that if you use the graphite anode, you can get into the 200s of watt hours per kilogram. As you start to include more and more silicon in the anodes, you can nudge that up into the 300s, depending on how much silicon you use in the anode. But when you get to lithium metal and you really remove all of the host material from the anode, you can unlock quite impressive energy densities. This is sort of one of the key insights that we had as well. Try and try and go to lithium metal anodes and address these key challenges. And, you know, I don't want anyone to misunderstand me that I'm not saying that we invented the lithium metal anode. It's just that this is the mission that we set for ourselves. Let's try and make it possible and safe and commercialized it. So this then shows the lithium ion architecture in comparison with the quantum scape architecture that we have where we have what we call an anode-free design. So there's no anode in the as-manufactured state. We have a separator that interfaces to a current collector and nothing present in the anode side. The cathode is relatively similar, both the active materials and ion conductors or catholite inside the cathode share a lot in common with lithium ion batteries, but we've replaced the anode with nothing in the manufactured state. And then all the lithium that's in the cathode material as manufactured will, on the first charge, come and plate at this interface between this separator and the current collector and form this block of lithium metal at the anode side. And then this is the lithium that cycles back and forth as you charge and discharge the cell. So one of the keys here to enabling this architecture is the separator. So we replaced the porous polymer separator with a dense ceramic separator here that sits between the anode and cathode. And it's this separator that's a key, I think, to enabling lithium metal, as we'll talk about. So what does this change enable in terms of energy density? So this is a map then of mass specific energy density or watt hours per kilogram on the y-axis and volumetric energy density on the x-axis, showing the range of commercialized chemistries from lithium ion phosphate or LFP chemistries, which are low energy density but low cost to what's more common in electric vehicles, at least the ones outside of China using an NFC or as Tesla uses NCA cathodes. So these batteries are going to improve by, you know, we're projecting several percent per year as you go to more nickel rich cathode chemistries and include more silicon on the anode. But what we're hoping to enable is really a pretty impressive change relative to what's typical in batteries of, you know, single digit percent per year improvements in energy density by switching to this lithium metal architecture. So that's the target. In terms of energy density, by removing the host material, we hope to improve on energy. By eliminating this lithium diffusion bottleneck that I talked about, we hope to enable fast charge. By eliminating this SEI formation at growth, we hope to improve in life. By eliminating a lot of the flammable materials in the cell, we hope to improve in safety. Then a further benefit in safety is, you know, if the car gets in a crash or has some over temperature event, the polymer separator can melt. And then as it peels back, it'll expose more contact area between the anode and the cathode. And that contact area can result in internal short circuits, which delivers a lot of energy to heat the battery very quickly. That is part of what can lead to this chain reaction or thermal runaway. So this is why that most modern separators today will start to include a layer of some ceramic particles that are still porous. The purpose of those ceramic particles is to try and prevent this thermal runaway by putting something that won't melt in between the anode and cathode. Well, our separator is this entirely dense ceramic material, so I think we achieved that effect, hopefully to a greater extent. And then in terms of cost, as I've described, we eliminate the anode manufacturing step and materials, so hopefully we can lower costs as well. So this change we hope to address these five metrics simultaneously. Now, as I said, we didn't affect the lithium metal anode. That concept has been around for decades. But it has been hard to commercialize and this is why you don't see a lot of cars today driving around with lithium metal anodes. So people have tried various different separator chemistries between organics and inorganics. There are many families of materials that have been attempted to work with lithium metal liquids, gels, solid polymers like PEO. Inorganics, they're sulfides and oxides are the most popular classes, also emerging over the last few years are halides, borohydrides. Unfortunately, all of the materials that have been tried have real challenges on at least one, if not more of this of the key metrics for the separator. So when it comes to the separator, some of the key requirements, at least in the automotive space are needs to have a high bulk conductivity competitive with liquid electrolytes. When you think about it, it's pretty impressive to have lithium hopping through a solid matrix as quickly as it'll transit through a liquid, but it is possible in some materials. Then the interface to the anode needs to be as conductive as possible. One of the things that's a little bit subtle and sometimes underappreciated is that there can be as much resistance at just the interface between the lithium metal anode and the separator as there is throughout the entire bulk of the separator. So to be able to have a high power battery and enable fast charge, you need to have a low interfacial resistance. ASR is an area specific resistance. The separator is going to be in contact with the anode and cathode over the life of the cell and also in contact with both the zero volts relative to lithium on the anode side and the high voltage of the cathode side. So maintaining stability over that very wide range of activity of lithium. There's about 80 orders of magnitude of lithium activity when you go from zero to four volts. 80 orders of magnitude is, you know, it's such a large number it's, it's literally astronomical number. There's something like 10 to the 80 atoms in the universe. So, the 80 orders of magnitude of lithium activity it's like saying you have, you know, metallic lithium on the anode side, and 10 to the minus 80 lithium activity on the cathode side is one atom of lithium per atom in the universe. It's just a huge range of lithium activity. So for a material to be stable across that full range is extremely challenging. And then of course dendrite resistance is probably the biggest challenge here. So as described earlier, when lithium plates on the anode, it tends to form these dendritic structures that bridge across to the cathode and result in an eternal short circuit. So dendrites tend to form exponentially more aggressively as you increase the current density during charge. So as you go to a fast charge requirement, it becomes very difficult. And I'm not aware of any really compelling demonstration that that a cell can resist dendrites over many cycles and realistic automotive conditions. That's a big challenge. Then finally the separator has to be made thin comparable to today's polymer separators can process it continuously not at batch modes or high vacuum processing to enable low cost over large areas. So it's really a difficult challenge. I'm not able to meet that challenge. Well, there are a couple of sort of fallback positions or compromises, either to revert to a hosted anode and use carbon or carbon silicon anode again, or use excess lithium, at which point you're really diluting the advantage that a solid state battery can have relative to lithium ion in terms of energy density and costs. So you might have to compromise the test conditions and sacrifice some of the real world operating conditions that automotive market expects to go to either slow charge rates or thin cathodes, low cycle life, or limited temperature range, for example run hot only. And these are sort of the compromises one might have to make if one doesn't have a separator that can meet all the requirements on the last slide. So that's sort of the landscape now I'll talk in more detail about quantum scape status and really go into the data of where we're at right now in solving all these monumental challenges. This is a photo of our separator. It's roughly the size of a smartphone shown here it's quite flexible that flexibility is not required in operation it'll be just flat in a cell, like what shown in the middle, but it does speak a little bit to its robustness. When it's thin, you know for those of you who are familiar with handling thin silicon wafers, even a silicon wafer that can get quite flexible as it's thin so it's pretty impressive what what thin films can do. And this is an image of our single layer pouch cells. Again roughly the size of a phone, and then image of our multi layer prototype cells over here on the right that that were, we've been developing over the last year. So let's start off getting into some of the data. This is a cycling data from the single layer from batches of our single layer pouch cells in this form factor. And it is I think one of the most impressive demonstrations of gender right resistance that our cell offers. So I'm showing the discharge energy on the y axis and cycles on the x axis here, the commercial target that Volkswagen has set for us and that we're setting for ourselves is 800 cycles to 80% fade. For context, a typical EV warranty today would be somewhere in between 100 and 150,000 miles to 70% so somewhere where my cursor is right here. We're trying to get to this 800 cycles to 80% target here. Why 800 cycles, if you have a long range electric car of say 300 miles, and if each cycle is 300 mile range then 800 cycles give you 240,000 miles. That's, that's pretty considerable to 80% fade. And so then this is showing batches of our cell performance here going out to over 1000 cycles. Cycling quite well under conditions that are listed in this table here. We're also trying to be transparent about the test conditions for for every test and so we'll give you the test conditions here. This is at a one C one C rate so one hour charge one hour discharge. That's pretty aggressive for a cycle life test like this that's typically done at C by three, meaning three hour charge. So this is three times higher current density on every charge. The total loading of north of three million hours per square centimeter is getting thick enough to have real energy in the cell. The temperature of 30 degrees is near root temperature. We're using the note free lithium metal and configuration that I described going full depth of discharge over the full commercially relevant areas. This is something I'll talk more about in a minute, but where these these tests are done under relatively modest pressure on single layer cells. So I think this was a pretty exciting proof that the materials and the processes that we use to make these materials are really capable of withstanding real world conditions or even more aggressive than real world conditions here. So then fast charge is, you know, another really key requirement we think so how do our cells doing fast charge. So this is in blue here is data that we collected on on cells in our lab showing fast charge capability. So the y axis is the state of charge over time on the x axis. So we did hear a four C charge rate, and you can see the cell charging up quite quickly. It beats this target we have set for ourselves of 80% in 15 minutes. What's shown in gray here is data that we didn't take in our lab but we found that was published on, you know, leading automotive cell hooked up to a supercharger that in 15 minutes gets to about 50%. And then the charge rate really has to taper off after then to avoid this problem that I spoke of earlier up lithium plating. So to get to 80% takes about 40 minutes in these type of cells. So this cell was was again the same cell that I described on the last last slide in terms of cathode loading temperature and area pressure number of layers and so forth. So it's the same cell that can do fast charge. We wanted to to really test dendrite resistance of the separator itself. So we took the separator out out of a cell and did a stress test where we just increase the current density and saw at what current density can the separator withstand. So we're passing small amounts of lithium and then increasing the current density past more lithium and increase the current density and continue to increase the current density here. So many solid state efforts can could do south of one million power one million per centimeter squared or or up to about one million per centimeter squared to get to the four C charge rates that I described earlier. You know 12 to 16 milliamps per square centimeter, depending on cathode thickness, we went all the way to north of 100 milliamps per square centimeter across the separator without failure. And so then this is showing the corresponding voltage that develops across this lithium lithium cell. I think that 45 degrees because that's really the condition probably most relevant to fast charge. I think most fast charges the car will already be driving. And so the batteries will be somewhat warm and that they'll also heat up due to their internal resistance as you charge. So 45 degrees is is a pretty relevant fast charge condition. That's an old lithium lithium configuration, because a cathode really can't deliver this kind of current density 100 milliamps per centimeter squared is just far north of what a cathode can sustain for for long periods of time. So again this this is the materials level test it's not inside a cell, but you can think of it just as a stress test to show a factor of safety above a real world operating condition. This is, I thought a pretty compelling demonstration of dendrite resistance. I'm not familiar with, with any other results that get anywhere close to this frankly, I've, you know, I'm happy to be contradicted in the q amp a please speak up a few, you know, otherwise. So we put the separators back into the cell and ran what I think is really the most stressful test that I've seen done on ourselves. This is a track cycle that we got from our automotive customers. To just describe this track cycle for a minute this is showing one lap around the simulated track here. So, just to be clear our batteries weren't actually in cars driving around the track we just took this drive cycle and did it on our single layer pouch cells. So those current density over time of one lap across around the track, accelerations of four or five C here, and regenerative breaking of one or two C, and then repeating this very aggressive accelerations on the straight away breaking going into the turns and one lap of the track. And then we repeat to get to about nine or 10 laps around the track until the battery is fully depleted. And then we go into a four C fast charge. And then we just repeat that cycle of laps around the track until the battery is fully depleted and four C fast charge, do that continuously. And so then this graph shows two of ourselves and how they perform on that test. And then the gradual fade for over 1200 laps around this this this track. This, this test is quite stringent so if you put a leading energy cell that came from a leading automotive on the same test. It fades fades much more quickly, just because this is a very aggressive test. And again all the test conditions listed here this was done on the same generations of cells that I've been describing the last few slides. So, next temperature performance, one of the knocks against a solid state battery is that they have to be hot to to run. I think maybe that intuition might come from polymer cells that need to be heated to 60 or 80 degrees to have sufficient lithium ion conductivity. So we wanted to show that our materials are capable of running across the full automotive temperature range down to minus 30 degrees C. So this just shows a single C by three discharge, decreasing temperatures from zero degrees down to minus 30 degrees C. So in between each of these discharges, we would do a C by three charge 30 degrees, just to get the full charge capacity. So this is really just showing discharge capability of the material system. And for comparison, this is again the same leading automotive cell here at minus 25 degrees, showing that it gets less capacity than ourselves do it at minus 30. So in the right solid state system, they can run across the full automotive temperature range. So then we wanted to show cycling at low temperatures. So this, this would be representative of sort of real world winter driving conditions minus 10 degrees C charging at C by five and discharging at C by three repeatedly. This is showing performance of ourselves, you know, across winter, showing that they retain a lot of capacity. And then again, these were the same generation of cell this single air pouch cell, same cathode thickness everything else. So I think solid state cells can work well at low temperature. This is this is some encouraging evidence. So let's come back to this, this pressure point here. So many cells need some pressure even lithium ion cells have some pressure to keep all the layers in contact with each other and as they as things swell and expand and contract as lithium moves in and out of the different layers. Solid state cells are often tested at at relatively higher pressures to keep all the layers in contact with each other. The cells that we've been using at about in the range of three atmospheres are I think a achievable pressure when you put it into a car. Now the higher pressure you go to the more volume and mass will be in a sense wasted at the pack level to apply that pressure you're going to need some, you know, steel or material in the cell in the module or the pack to apply the pressure to a cell. So we're trying to enable low pressures. Now the range of three atmospheres is something that we think might be doable with with not too large of a penalty at the pack level but we also wanted to show that the technology is capable of going to lower pressures. Here were some small cells that we put on just as a feasibility test showing cycling at one C one C conditions. Still relatively thick cathodes near room temperature within a free lithium metal full depth of discharge. They were there were relatively small cells we haven't baseline to this and in our large cells, but cycling at one atmosphere absolute pressure meaning these these pouch cells were unfixed. There was there was nothing additional applying any pressure. They're just in a pouch cell that we evacuate. So you get ambient room pressure on the outside of the pouch cell. So one atmosphere absolute pressure. So what you can see is that these cells are all performing quite well, you know, cycling with gradual fade out to 1400 cycles, even under the ones you want to test conditions with zero pressure. So like I said, we haven't baseline this low pressure performance on our larger area cells, but I think it's a pretty compelling proof that the materials are capable. So this is something we'll be continuing to work on. Then next, one other demonstration that we just sort of threw on to prove a point that our, our separator and anode free lithium metal cell architecture is we can think of it kind of as a platform technology. It could enable many different cathodes. So all the results I've shown you up till now are using nickel rich and MC material. We also wanted to show that lithium iron phosphate LFP could work in our system. So we made a four million power per square centimeter LFP cathode that that's a pretty thick LFP cathode. And just did sort of 100 cycle compatibility test of a few cells here. Again, these were were small cells, small single layer cells. That where the active materials are roughly the size of a coin cell single layer cells, but just to prove materials compatibility and sort of show our customers. Hey, if you want lower costs, lower energy density LFP, that technology works as well. And we can develop it. Our core focus really has been on the high energy density cell. So that's, that's what we're really focused on. But I think this is interesting, especially in recent weeks as you've seen more and more automakers say that they're really looking at LFP. So Volkswagen has said that a lot of their fleet should use low nickel technologies to get to low cost. And recently Elon Musk said, I think it was last week he said that as much as two thirds of their fleet might switch to LFP just to get to into the lower cost points. So if we're hearing more of that from our customers and we could do more demonstration of LFP. The last point I'll make about LFP is, because it's a lower voltage chemistry for the same company, it's going to have a thicker cathode, and therefore require a thicker anode. So when you are using a hosted anode, that anode will impose a larger penalty on LFP than it would on a high voltage material. So if you switch to our architecture of lithium, lithium metal anode that's anode free, you get an even bigger benefit on LFP than you do on a high voltage cathode. So the energy density improvements that we hope to enable for NFC will be, you know, as a percentage basis, even larger on LFP. So that could be interesting we'll see how this plays out as we move forward. So in safety here, we wanted to show that our separator is stable against lithium. And so what we did is we put lithium in contact with our separator inside a DSC device, a differential scanning calorimeter, basically a device that can measure heat flows in and out. So we put lithium in contact with our separator here. As you as we heat up, you see basically no little heat flow in or out of the system. When you get to 180 degrees C that's where lithium melts. So you see a little bit of an endotherm here, that's the latent heat of melting lithium. And then as you continue to heat molten lithium in contact with our separator there's no no exothermic reaction that that we see here. So in contrast, if you do the same test of lithium in contact with electric liquid electrolyte, when you get to the point where lithium melts you'll see a large exothermic reaction. This is the reaction of lithium and a liquid electrolyte that's not surprising, but the contrast here I think shows that our separator is quite stable in contact with lithium. So this is is going to be important from a safety point of view. This has been so far I've talked really about the fundamental materials that we and materials level demonstrations that we've made on single layer cells. Of course, to commercialize the technology we're going to need to make high energy cells which means we need to multi layer cell. So now let's talk about the progress that we've made in the last year and multi layering cells. So this is again the schematic of a unit cell of a one layer cell. A two layer cell would be to take the cathode current collector and coat cathode on both sides that's what's done in lithium ion today, and then put our separator on each side of that. And so that is then a two layer cell. And then a four layer cell would be to take two of these and stack them on top of each other. So a four layer cell is really that the, the fundamental building block of further stacking, because here you have all of the interfaces that you'll have in, in an end layer cell, you have cathode to cathode here, and you have an ode to an ode here. So it's all of the key interfaces so as you go towards dozens of layers, you do you would just replicate these four layer units and stack them on top of each other. So the four layer stack is is really that the unit that that would demonstrate all of the functionality of further stacking on top of that. So we have made four layer cells and and cycle them and shown that the cycling is consistent basically with the single layer cells. So the first four layer cells we were making were, were smaller areas, these were 30 by 30 millimeters. We tested these at C by three and one C rates in with a similar cathode loading your room temperature, same pressure but four layer cells, and showing that we can exceed this commercial target of 800 cycles to 80%. These, these cells were all exceeding that pretty comfortably. So this was, was an interesting early demonstration that that multi layering could work. Again, these were done with smaller areas. Since then we progressed to larger area multi layer cells. Again, our latest cells that are still on test here, they're, they're passing 450 cycles as we speak, still going, retaining a lot of their capacity unit one C, one C rates with same cathode loading room temperature, full depth of discharge, full full commercially relevant area here for later cells. That there's nothing fundamentally impossible about doing multi layering in our technology. And so that very recently, we went beyond four layers that the goal we had for ourselves was to prove for that four layers could work and then go up to 10 layers by the end of the year. We don't have the full 10 layer demonstrations yet, but just the very earliest 10 layer cells that we've put on that we've we've put on show that 10 layer cells can work. I don't want to over conclude here they're still very young, right only only a few dozen cycles but but still going strong here under both one C and C by three conditions. This is, it's very recent right these cells are cells are still in test and racking up cycles so we'll see how they go, but it does show that we can get to 10 layers. Just one word on why multi layering has has taken us so long. Right, we showed some of the single layer results last December and now here we are about seven months later showing very early 10 layer results. It's basically a question of how much material we're able to make. So, we took the approach of trying to try to prove that all the materials can meet the key automotive requirements before scaling up. I think that's sort of fundamentally the right approach. If you, if you prematurely scale up well and maybe you're going to still have to go back to the square one and change materials or sell architecture. So I wanted to show that the materials and sell architecture can was really capable of meeting the key automotive requirements before scaling up. So we had, you know, small generations of the tools that could make enough material to make and test lots of single layer cells right to do development you need to run a lot of experiments and then you need to also run a lot of statistics you need to have large sample sizes to know your reliability. So we had the smaller tools that could make enough material for single layers. And then to go over to a 10 layer cell, you would need to either multiply your, your facility footprint by a factor of 10, no go from a 80,000 square foot facility like the one we have to 800,000 square foot facility and get 10 of every tool that you have and hire 10 times as many employees as you currently have. And you, you would either do that if everything scales linearly, which of course is not what you want to do, you want to capture economies of scale. So the alternative you have is to buy much bigger or more scalable tools that that capture economies of scale, but these bigger tools have very lovely times, you know, that are not measured in weeks that measured in months or quarters. And then you need to install these tools, qualify a process on them. So that's, that's really what, why multi layering takes takes a while. Okay, so just to kind of wrap up the data section I want to put our data in context of, of the other data that I'm familiar with from companies that are really seriously trying to commercialize solid state batteries. So this is a chart that is published on our website. I'm not going to go into every cell here because there's quite a lot of information, but if you're interested you can go and take a look at it on our website. We're trying to just compile in one place, the most serious solid state technology efforts. So Toyota prologium and solid power are all working in solid state systems with a hosted inode material. For the most part they haven't published cell data. We'll see if Toyota still has a demonstration during the Tokyo Olympics like they've been promising prologium has said that their carbon and odds can get to 1300 cycles but haven't published most of the other relevant test conditions. So we'll we'll see as they develop. So a couple of the key players working with solid state and lithium metal materials working on polymers. Samsung has published a paper last year on their sulfide technology and SES that's also recently coming out and announcing that they're going to go public with a polymer and liquid hybrid cell and lithium metal. So if you're going into all the details and boring you what I'll just point out is that these technologies have either had to sacrifice in terms of cycle life. In terms of running at high temperature and pressure of 20 atmospheres at 60 degrees C, or low current densities of like C by five rates, which which wouldn't enable fast charge. This is kind of the landscape of some of the most serious players out there. If I missed anything or gotten anything wrong I haven't heard it since we put out this chart several months ago so certainly open to it in the q amp a if you know these players have published anything more recently. So I think, you know we've got a pretty compelling technology let's talk about how the road towards pilot and manufacturing will look. So, sort of at a high level the manufacturing flow of lithium ion cell, you start with cathode materials and mix it into a slurry with the binder conductive additive and solvents. You mix it you go to the electrodes you calendar them. I slip them to size and dry them. You put in separator that typically purchased will all come together and either a stacking or winding step will be, then you go into the cell assembly formation and testing and finally shipping the cell. So, as I've been saying our technology does away with this anode. So you could either convert your manufacturing line into a cathode line and get twice the throughput of it, or if you're building a new factory just not put in this this whole manufacturing line and have a more capital efficient factory that that makes the cathode buys the separator from us assembles that into the cell. I haven't talked much about this but we hope to substantially reduce this formation process, because again we're not forming the SCI on the end. So, a lot of this formation process can hopefully be reduced. So hopefully, sort of illustrate why we, we hope to have a cost advantage relative to lithium ion battery. You can do away with with a lot of the factory here. Then let's talk about the separator for a minute. Our separator materials use precursors that are abundant. Low cost and used in other industries. So we're not introducing, you know, expensive and rare elements here. There's only continuous flow processes. So this is a picture of a coder. We use continuous coding continuous flow treatment to make the separator. There are processes that are used at scale and the battery and ceramics industries. So, the combination of low cost materials and low cost continuous processing we hope to make cheap separators. So, what that would translate to in terms of costs, we've done, you know, pretty extensive cost modeling relative to traditional lithium ion. We hope to eliminate, you know, roughly 17% of the cost by these benefits that I've described previously. And so of course lithium ion isn't standing still they're going to be reducing cost as they get to higher economies of scale, larger factory footprints, better supply chains. So many of these benefits we hope to capture as well. You know, if there's anything that relates to cathode, we can benefit from that as well. On the cell assembly and manufacturing side a lot of those improvements will translate to our cell as well. So as lithium ion comes down the cost curve we hope that we can ride down a parallel but lower cost curve, because we've again eliminated the cost. So I think that is all a hopefully a pretty compelling technology. We're not done yet of course we're not selling these cells so what have we got left to do. These are the three key remaining tasks that we're going to be working on improving our separator process so we need to improve the quality and consistency of the separator manufacturing process, and then the throughput as well. As I discussed, as we increase the throughput that'll enable us to increase the layer count in multi layer cells, we're aiming to target the dozens of layers for automotive cells, and then go into further ramping and improving volume manufacturing processes in a pilot line. That'll happen in several chunks. Today we're doing engineering in basically a scaled up R&D lab in San Jose, about 80,000 square feet that we've been using to develop prototypes. We have secured a larger nearby building that's 200,000 square feet. We're currently installing the dry rooms here and we'll be installing tools. We hope to move in by the end of the year here. This is what we would use as our pilot facility where we'll be producing on the orders of call it 100,000 cells where we can use mass market or mass manufacturing equipment to produce prototypes for customers and then scale into mass manufacturing after that. So to put this in a time axis. These are some of the key milestones that we set out for ourselves publicly last year to secure that, what we're calling the QS0, QuantumScape pilot line facility. We met a Volkswagen technical milestone that involved them sampling our cells earlier this year. Still working on the four layer to 10 layer cells that we're targeting by the end of the year. But we are showing really good progress there that shows I think we're on track. The next year, do more customer prototype sampling and really move in install all the tools into our pilot line. In 2023 use that pilot line to produce a lot of samples that our partners can use and test the cars, and then to ramp up into commercialization after that. I don't want to minimize the challenges in front of us that there's going to be a lot of challenges in the manufacturing process. You know that said, I think we have overcome a lot of the key chemistry and materials challenges to get to this point. So, I also don't want to minimize what we've done so far. There's going to be a lot of challenges going forward. So if these are the kinds of challenges that excite you I'd I'd invite you please go, we're hiring really aggressively we've, we've added, you know, we've basically doubled the company size since coronavirus, which that in itself has been an interesting journey to grow well, we've had to be mostly remote. And we're continuing to grow we have over 100 job openings currently posted on our website across a full range of technical and even non technical roles. And this is a picture inside one of our many dry rooms here showing, you know, packed with equipment and we need the people to come in and run this equipment. So this is the kind of thing that interests you please do go to quantum skate calm and look in our careers page. I'd love to have you. So this is, this is the talk I'm happy to take questions from the audience. Thank you very much for all we'll talk what's happening in the con escape. There are really a large number of questions flowing in, as you can see people excited about learning about con escape. So if you don't mind let me start by asking one question just to warm up. So team. I'm glad to see the progress in condomscape. So we'll have some questions starting from the first one, maybe touch upon the know how the secret in condomscape feel free to know to answer directly. So the first question is, you know, there's a lot of people working on solid state batteries university lab national lab startup companies, everybody talk about it. There are three major class of solid electrolyte where there's solid state polymer, where there's a ceramics of oxide or sulfide. Can you disclose what's the electrolyte condomscape is using in terms of composition or roughly the, what category is it and I think everybody's wondering about that so I'll just ask this question for everybody. Yeah, yeah, great. So what we've said is that it's a fully dense 100% ceramic material. We haven't disclosed its composition but but what I can say is that throughout our throughout our many years of development, we tried and tested a lot of, a lot of different later materials so not only did we read all the papers but we got intimately familiar with all the common materials from, you know, oxides, sulfides, polymers, gels, borohydrides, halides, you know you name it, basically we tested it. Any perovskites, any perovskites, everything you know we've got pretty intimate hands on experience so we're familiar with all the challenges. So in the slide where I sort of laid out a lot of the key challenges of separators. This was not just, you know, from a study of reading a lot of journals but we did theoretical studies DFT simulations and a lot of experiments to understand all the challenges. Yeah, it unfortunately I can't reveal our composition because that is kind of the secret sauce but you know we're familiar with with all the challenges here and I think it takes a pretty deep level of understanding to arrive at the right chemistry and and then further more of the right process of how do you produce it. So team, is there a plan when you could disclose this. The reason to ask is, I find out all the companies so I want to convince other people their technologies are working. They will need to tell people to build up that confidence and say well this is working because of we use ABC and D. You know this confidential information it needs people keep it for a while. By some point this probably all needs to come out to provide a convincing, you know, chemistry. What why it's working. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, well, okay I mean, in terms of people we need to convince I think our customers are our number one. We really need to convince our customers that the technology works. Because that we we provide samples to the customers that they can test in their labs. And, you know, most of those haven't been announced but Volkswagen has issued several press releases that they've tested ourselves and they were, they work according to all the expectations and automotive requirements that that they were supposed to. That the proof really isn't the pudding. You know, if I told you are separator technology is X. I don't think that would be a compelling proof that it works because like I said, none of these have been demonstrated to work. So I think that the proof is really in the cell data that that I revealed to you. I'm feeling that the technology, you know, maybe at some point after a commercial launch, when the cells are available. You know, at that point I might expect our competitors to acquire some of the cells and take them apart and reverse engineer them. So, at some point that the cattle be out of the bag, we might, you know, at that point be free to talk about it. But I think it's still several years till we get there so I wouldn't want to sacrifice this several year, hopefully head start that we've got here, nor our investors have invested money on the premise that they're going to hopefully be able to make some money here. So by giving away our head start, we would be not doing our power fiduciary obligation toward our investors. Yeah. Well, pass to you. And Tim again congratulations on now the all standing progress and it's really amazing to watch the progress even just over the past few months as you release more and more results and thank you for getting into quite a bit of technical details I think many of our listeners are scientists and engineers, both in academia and industry so I greatly appreciate it. I was going to ask you a high level question but I want to maybe piggyback off what he asked. When you say you're examining all of the possible solid electrolyte whether it's in academic publications and your own innovations. How much optimization goes into a particular chemistry before you say it's not going to work. I imagine it's not just as simple as oh here's the recipe we try it, and it's as a no go because you're also very concerned about false and negatives right. Can you speak to about how much care and tension and resources it takes to qualify a material and say it's not going to work. I think you can never prove that it doesn't work. There's always some things that you haven't tried. So, you know the first probably five years of the company was this period where we we found out and explored very broadly all the materials that that we were familiar had been published and and then a lot of the more obscure ones as well. Like I said you can, I don't think you can ever prove that it's impossible, but you can get familiar enough to understand, well this is not low hanging fruit. And then it's only by weighing alternatives against each other that you can say well which are the more promising alternatives that you ought to be spending your time on. Great Tim and maybe to that point. The winners that you have picked to pursue is is the difference relative to the second place in the third place material and it's so big that the the arrow bar just doesn't matter so that the certainty is is is is absolute, or were you making decision between, you know, three top contenders. You know, coming from more of a statistics background which I think Tim, you highly appreciate just as how tough was that decision at the end. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, thanks for pushing me on that. Good follow up. So, you know, I think there are some that are pretty easy calls. Like, for example, it's my personal opinion that using a liquid with lithium metal is a very risky proposition. You know I went back and looked at the Molly energy experience, and just said boy can we really trust a liquid and a porous separator to withstand dendrites across the full range of operating conditions that we're not going to know ahead of time. Some of them, you know, we had gut calls with with a more theoretical argument like that. Of course, I'm very aware that many people are still pursuing liquids and I wish them the best of luck. There's exciting developments there but where I don't know that I would get a car that use lithium metal with a liquid electrolyte. And then others, you know, we had a more experimental basis for the decision where, you know, I, like I said, I can't prove that something's not going to work. So, I think Samsung's got a pretty interesting paper from last year using sulfides, where they had to apply very high temperatures and pressures, but I couldn't say that their technology couldn't be made to work in the long run. So, you know, at the end, when we had winnowed down our material set to the last two, it took maybe a year or two for us to finally lock down on one of those. And, you know, maybe we'll still be wrong. Maybe there's something better out there that I just don't know. You know, at the end, you, you have to make a judgment call in the absence of data because you can never get all of the data you need. And, you know, lots of leaders from, from Jeff ML to Steve Jobs would say that at some point you just have to make a decision because you can't let perfection stand in the way of progress. If you make a decision you can make progress. And yeah, maybe it won't be perfect maybe you'll have to go and revisit your decision at some point. But without making a decision you can't make progress. So, at some point you just have to say, All right, we're never going to have all the data. Let's use all the data we have to make our best judgment. Tim, thanks so much for the insight on your innovation philosophy. It's, it's really wonderful to see it. E. So, Tim, so let's look at the account scape or sell a geometry, right, so it's very interesting to to see you go down to the path of NO3. You save the cost of producing NO, you have your ceramic separator. So, then what about cathode? Now if it's all, I assume it's all solid state, no liquid in there. Then, so the cathode side require conduction as well. So, looks like if that's the case, the traditional cathode will not work well, unless you also blend it in. So, I'm conducting solid state materials with the cathode. So, can you mention a little bit talk a little bit about the cathode? How could you enable solid state? I know just many startup company put in liquid electrolyte and end on the cathode part because that also require conduction. Yeah, it will be good to hear your thoughts. Yeah. Great. So, let me, let me clarify here. So, all of the results that I showed you today are using an organic catholite here. It's not an organic solid material. They're organics that are a combination of a liquid and polymer. So, that said, we do have programs on three different ion conducting additives in the cathode. We have programs in liquids, gels, and solid state here to enable full solid state. All three have their own unique challenges, which is why we're still pursuing all three in parallel. But the data that I showed you today use an organic material in the cathode. Okay. So, yeah, that's interesting. Indeed, this comes back to the, all the challenges. So, academia talked about. So, the industry are very, very well aware of is what the interface, the annual lithium matter solid state interface and cathode and solid electrolyte interface. So, this volume change structure change interface will not be stable will be good to hear your thoughts about these these problems because you guys made a lot of progress, maybe you understanding get to next level. If you could share a little bit on that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, excellent point. So, the bulk is relatively much more simple and straightforward than the interfaces. I've spent a long time studying all of all of those key interfaces separator to anode separator to cathode and cathode to catholite material, all of these interfaces are really critical to understand. So we've built quite an impressive set I would have to say a material science capabilities inside the company, you know, walk around the Stanford material science department and we've got basically all those tools and sometimes more. Phibs and SCMs and XPS and XRF and, you know, just all across the board we've had to do a lot of studying of the reactions that can occur at the interfaces. You know, one thing to emphasize this anode to separator interface is a pretty key one because it's a low surface area interface. So if you look at lithium ion cell, the graphite to ion conductor interfaces is large because you have a lot of graphite particles. So there's maybe roughly a factor of 20 in terms of surface area between a graphite anode or hosted anode and just the geometric interface interfacial area. So that means all else being equal you need to have 20 times lower as our area specific resistance at this interface to enable the same power density. That's, that's definitely a challenge you need to have some good engineering of that interface in particular to enable high rates. But then really every interface is critical when it comes to cycling when it comes to calendar life of the cell. You can't have massive side reactions at any of these interfaces. Thanks team well back to you. All right. We have a lot of questions I think this is the most number of questions we have seen since Stan Winningham's inaugural talk with this so I'm still trying to group them because I don't think I can ask you 40 questions. But before I do that. Let me just want to ask my high level question, which is the following. I really like the slide you show at the end on the manufacturing process on the bottlenecks and so forth. There have been many fields. Historically, that worked with thin film ceramics and the thin film glasses for that matter. There's a huge amount of learning there when you look at that body of work that body of industry experience. How much of that can you draw from when you start to skill up, you know, making 10s or hundreds of millions of the year membranes. And what kind of challenges do you see from these results. There's anything that gives you a pause in terms of game maybe this will require further engineering, just the learnings through a Jensen fields. Yeah, yeah, good, good topic of discussion here so we've spent probably the last six years. We've been exclusively focused on processing know that big chunks of company history were roughly five years to pick a materials and system and architecture and then since then, we've really been focused on the process so it's a very complicated, a lot of subtleties a lot of interactions up and down the line. You know something way up the line can have these unexpected consequences down the line. So there's been a lot of process engineering and it's also an area that's made especially difficult, because I would say there's, there's relatively less academic or theoretical understanding of what happens inside a processing chamber relative to once you have a material, you know how does it perform. It just had to be mostly empirical. Where, you know, you just do a lot of big do ease, and you get subtle signals and sometimes you get those wrong, you have to go back and revisit them. We have, of course, hired a lot of expertise from adjacent industries. We've read what's available, but then you just have to do a lot of experimentation as well. And I know that there are some like Professor Rupp who you had in a recent seminar, who are now studying from an academic perspective different processing techniques. And I think that's a really rich field of further inquiry. So I know that a lot of academics tuned into this discussion I would I would highly encourage more academic focus I think on processing. One of the things that makes this hard is there's no debugger for atoms. If you're writing a piece of software code, you can run it into debugging mode and step through line by line of the code and see where things go wrong. But inside a process chamber, you can't do that. You can't watch where all the atoms are going and step through, you know, atom by atom as something happens and see where it goes wrong. You know, you put something in to a process chamber, it's almost like a black box you can take a few average measurements like pressure and temperature inside the chamber. But you're you're really almost flying blind, and you get something out at the end and then you have to use, you know, XPS or something like that to test it and XRD to figure out what you just made. If you could open up that black box and make it more of a white box with a lot more understanding. I think that's a really obviously a very challenging field, but also really promising and important one. Great team if I can follow up just very briefly. You know the the one example that comes to mind that has, you know, these thin membranes is, you know, something like solid oxide fuel cell membranes. In comparison to that processing. Is it much more demanding for quantum state quantum skips technology or houses similar. I'm just trying to get a sense of the processing difficulties here. Yeah, yeah, great fuel cells are one of the closer analogues as is the field of multi layer ceramic capacitors mlcc's. So we have drawn inspiration and and processing techniques and equipment from those fields. So fuel cells are typically making thicker membranes than we make right you make, and they make an anode supported or cathode supported or electrolyte supported fuel cell, which at the end of the day turns out to often be hundreds of microns to even millimeters thick in a battery I don't think that'll work. Our current densities are lower. We use thinner layers for anode cathode and separator. So one of the key challenges relative to fuel cells is making much thinner materials. And another one is if you make something like YSE, for example, a very common fuel cell solid oxide fuel cell membrane. It's relatively under compared to most separator materials that to conduct lithium you have to contain lithium and lithium is pretty volatile. So, working with lithium containing materials is is in many ways more challenging than working with the more inert materials like YSE. mlcc's is the other industry I mentioned, they make super thin ceramic materials that can often be, you know, micron or so in thickness, even less for the ceramic components. So that that's a very interesting technology. However, on the other side, they're usually very small, you know, if you know mlcc's they're often the size of a grain of sand, something very small. It's a big and growing field, right? A recent iPhone has over 1000 mlcc's in it. Electric cars might have tens of thousands, or over 10,000 mlcc's. So it's a field where there has been a lot of technology development and processing manufacturing know how. But again, much smaller devices than we need to make in a battery. But I think drawing from these two fields, as well as battery manufacturing, you know, we want to use to the extent possible tools and processes that are known in the battery industry. So those are the key sources of inspiration. Very exciting. Thank you, Jim. So maybe we should dive into some of the technical questions from the audience, I think. Yeah, so many. Yeah, sounds good. Well, maybe I'll take the first one. So team. This is from our friend, a solid stable expert, you're gonna get it from Germany. He asked, you go from 3.4 bar to one bar the pressure right this is this step difficult. What's the challenge right there just from the number. You make it easy doing your presentation. So what's the challenge right there, you know, go from 3.4 to one bar. Yeah, this was definitely not easy. It has taken, you know, a team of ours, probably a couple of years to get to the point where we could demonstrate this. It's, it's not easy. So some of the key steps along the way were interfaces as we discussed earlier, if interfaces are high resistance, then, then you're not going to be able to cycle at these rates. And then if anything develops throughout cycling, any separation of the interfaces, for example, then you just wouldn't be able to see performance like this. And just the one atmosphere absolute pressure. So interfaces were a key area focus, and then the cell construction as well. So on top of just what materials do you use to, you know, this this one atmosphere of room pressure basically that gets applied to the outside of the pouch you want to use as much of that it's possible. So figuring out how to to to use that ambient pressure on the active materials was was a little bit of cell engineering that has to be figured out. Yeah. Well, back to you. Sure. And Tim, just as he said, you know, these are questions from the audience. So if you're not able to answer them, please feel free not to do so. And don't kill the messenger either. I thought I'll start with something that you mentioned, which is the formation time for the solid state cells can be a lot shorter than lithium and certainly, you know, if anyone's been to a battery cell plan, they know that the formation takes a lot of footprint in the factory. I was going to ask the opposite question is, have you found increasing the formation time to have some benefit for solid state, or there's just no benefit at all of having any information. Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. You know, I think Tesla in their battery day said that they're trying to make a lot of improvements to the formation process because like you said it takes a huge amount of space and a lot of capital. So in terms of reducing formation, I think, you know, one thing that you probably can't get away from in high volume manufacturing is, is some ability to bend the cells. You're going to end up taking each cell and then stacking them in parallel and in series configurations. And you want all the cells that are in the similar groups and strings to have near the same impedance and near the same capacity. So you probably need to at least do a test that enables you to qualify the cell in terms of its impedance and capacity to be able to bend them and group them with other similar cells. Whether you could do that with less than one complete charge is a really interesting question. There's probably, you know, your own lab has published some machine learning approaches to making the most out of a little bit of data. So, you know, what you can speculate that, you know, run, run an extremely short pulse of current through the cell, and then see if you can get all the information that you can out of that. You could even speculate of doing EIS or something that introduces some frequency dependent response and try and use that information to fully characterize the cell. I would say that there's, there's probably some papers in there because I don't think that's a cell technology yet. But I think that would be the dream of a short of formation cycle as possible. And certainly I think any advance in speeding information for for conventional lithium on battery should be partially transferable to the solid state so I think that will be an energy. Let me ask another one before handing back to you, this is a big one. Can you tell us about your first cycle ebrew for stability I noticed that you normalized it to the maximum energy of the cell. You know, for the audience you have to carry these extra lithium in the cathode right which adds cost and weight. This is something you're able to comment on Tim. Yeah, so just for clarity I did take out the formation cycle on these charts so the formation cycle would would we usually run at slightly lower than one C rates so you get a little bit more capacity and then make the whole thing shift down a little bit. That's, you know, that's typically you would been a cells capacity and name it's nominal capacity not off of the formation cycle but after something just post that first cycle. Our first cycle looks much like much like anyone else would find in their labs. We use a similar NMC to what's in commercial lithium ion. So as many people know, there is a first cycle Colombic inefficiency from that first cycle that would have between five and 10% excess lithium and that's first cycle. Now that excess lithium in a lithium ion cell is really useful because it will go into forming the SCI. In our system we're not forming that SCI so that it's just a little bit of excess lithium. It doesn't add any additional cost because it all just comes along with the NMC that's synthesized. Tim just to clarify so so you have some irreversibility, but you're saying it's not going to SCI so where does it go. Yeah, it's just from the cathode material. So just as any other person who buys an NFC or even makes it let the eights it would find that there's some lithium that you can't put back into the NFC at the same rate that you take it out. That that'll happen in our cathode as well. And so then that lithium on the first charge will plate onto the outside. So you're saying Tim that all the irreversibility comes from the irreversible capacitor to pseudo irreversible capacity loss in the cathode. None from the Anna so your overall irreversibility is smaller than a conventional lithium on that. Yeah, I believe so. So we have tried to measure columbic inefficiency of ourselves and it's it's actually very difficult to measure because we're into the, the many lines where a typical cycler is not accurate enough to measure it. But you can, you know, a slide like this, I think is is pretty sufficient to demonstrate very high columbic efficiency right we add zero excess lithium to the cell, and you can get to over 1400 cycles to to north of 80%. So you could translate this back into a capacity retention metric and it's, it's something like 99.99 something percent of capacity retention cycle to cycle. And that's almost exactly the columbic efficiency of the cell. Although, like I said, the columbic efficiency is hard to measure because it's so good. Right Tim thanks it's very exciting to hear back to you. I want to come back to this question but in a different way well we'll ask previously about a scaling right you know you touch upon in your talk the materials you need to make a sufficient amount to go to the next level. You touch upon that in a, you know, different different perspective. It's about a year. And, and when you scale this a lateral size become bigger for maybe coupon size console size to bigger and bigger you know I understand eventually you are going to settle on one of the size. You, you feel like that's that's the best in terms of performance and scale up. So there's a lateral size right there. And we know solid state you made a single layer and then go to multi layer or solid state then this pressure going in. So do you can you mention something about the year, you know, and there's a lot of people working on solid state will know, you know, once you have solid state you press it a little bit. This is to crack and the year goes down. If you go to larger areas even harder and you go to multi layer it will be even harder this is scale in a sense is you find a year will be impacted. So it will be great to see your comment on the question of the year and when you do scale up. Yeah. You're right. So this is why that we we sort of emphasize that a lot of our results were on this commercially relevant form factor here. You know, you're absolutely right we went through several steps of scale from these sort of coin size cells to do this intermediate form factor I showed one result that was 30 by 30 millimeters to this what we call a commercially relevant size. Various automakers might have, you know, slightly different preferred sizes, depending on what capacity they want for each cell and how they handle safety and thermals of the cell. But but I do think this is a commercially relevant size when we make, you know, several dozen layers here, it would would have a capacity larger than a 2170 cell larger than a 4680 I believe so it's still a healthy sized cell. So the trends in the industry is going to larger and larger cells I think, at least. So not only is Tesla on the spectrum of 18650 to 2170 and 4680, but Volkswagen has announced their platform of quite large cells. GM has announced they're trying to go to large cells the byd blade is quite large. I think in the, in the fullness of time, we can probably make cells that are quite large. So when you make cells large so yield that you mentioned is one of the trade offs but that's something that will be continuing to strive to improve other trade offs would be safety of cell propagation events. So the bigger your cell is the more risk there is of if there is a safety event in the cell that it could release enough energy to then propagate to adjacent cells. Another trade off is the sort of modularity that you would be able to achieve a bigger cell is going to have fewer ways to stack in series and parallel to achieve the different sort of energy targets. So if you're trying to, you know, many of the car makers are trying to get one battery to address a lot of their fleet so that they can benefit from the economies of scale of the battery. But then it means that they'll be locked into sort of a few discrete quanta of pack sizes in terms of kilowatt hours. So that's another one of the drawbacks to larger cells and then another one I could mention is thermals. So as the cell gets larger and larger, the more likely it is to have some thermal gradients across the cell which then results in impedance differences laterally in the cell, which could result in some parts of the cell being pulled harder than others. So there are a lot of trade offs when you're talking about cell size. I think we picked a pretty good sweet spot where when we make several dozen layers here as we're targeting, it'll have a good energy density where there's enough energy to drown out the packaging contributions. I think it makes for a pretty good initial launch. So this is the form factor that we are planning for the first automotive prototypes. But then like we said over time, it make larger cells. Thanks team will back to you. All right, Tim, here's another direct technical question. And thank you for all of your direct answers really appreciate it. You showed a lot of results on cycle life and many of them are at relatively high rates. Can you also comment on the calendar aging for solid state cells. Yeah, yeah, good question. So I did show some cycle life to to many cycles at C by three. So those those take a long time right. Let's see to do the quick math, you get what about four cycles a day at C by three so when you get out to 1000 cycles that's 250 days, you know, just to do the rough math. So it's, it's not a short period of time. That's another thing that makes battery development slow as you know, we're, you know, machine learning and accelerated life testing. So we haven't released any other calendar life data, other than to show that the fade can be quite gradual over these extended cycling durations. Thank you Tim and just to calibrate our audience as well. Can you just tell us the expectation for calendar life for say consumer electronics versus EV applications. Yeah, yeah, good question. You know, lithium ion cells are quite impressive. So there's, there is little calendar life fade and a lithium ion cell. You know the expectation is over the life of the cell for the impedance to grow, maybe by 50 to 100%. And the life of the cell is expected to be anywhere between eight and 12 years. So to get, call it 50 to 100% impedance growth in eight to 12 years. That's, that's a tall order. The best lithium ion cells can pretty much do that today. And Tim, am I correct to say if you extrapolate what you have for example in your first cycle per day experiment it is still fall a bit below that right quite a bit below that in the calendar life. Yeah, we haven't commented on the calendar life of ourselves yet so I can address that. I see. Alright, we'll try to estimate it from the, the C over three tests. Maybe let me just ask one related technical question. One thing that struck me is quite interesting is you report 100% depth of discharge, just from a more scientific engineering sense can you tell us what that means are you removing all of the lithium from the left side. Okay, who are reclating fresh lithium from scratch every single full DOB cycle, or do you mean something else? Yeah, so I think typical definition, or at least the one we use it is between voltage limit so you usually define your lower voltage cutoff and your upper voltage cutoff and cycle between those. That's how we do when we do 100% depth of discharge we mean, all the way from the lowest cutoff voltage the upper cutoff voltage that would be, you know, that when we report a cathode loading. That's the cathode loading that we observe cycling between those voltage ranges. So it's not like we're cycling between 3.8 and 3.9 and calling that 100% depth of discharge it's depth of discharge is the voltage that gets you this capacity from the cathode. So you always you're saving a little bit of lithium per cycle I presume then on the negative side. Yeah, I think the lithium goes where it will. We control current and voltage and the lithium goes where it wants to. Thank you. Yeah, even maybe we have to stop the Inquisition. Yeah, he's so generous with his insights and comments. You ask us some questions. Yeah. Well, I think the first, first question I'd like to ask is, you know, have you seen anything else that that, you know, I guess, we've missed when we lay out the competitive landscape is there anything else out there that that is coming from the results that we've demonstrated? Yeah, I think, Tim, you gave a very nice typical examples in each category. I think that's quite a fair analysis and what's what's happening in the world. Yeah. And certainly, it's a problem require academia national lab and industry all working very hard to work. Yeah. Tim, let me echo that as well. And, you know, I think quantum escape and your team in particular has, you know, setting a really high bar for disclosing data, although, you know, many people say more data should be disclosed but you have disclosed the most. And what I really appreciate is quantum escape is sharing its, you know, best data with the world. And, you know, I think sometimes the comparison can be a little bit biased because, you know, quantum escape is such a leader in sharing great results and others are sharing them with a slightly different goal in mind. So I think maybe this is also a call to everybody to share data more openly and their best performing data so we can really make comparisons across the board. But, you know, I think you're really doing something really fantastic here to put the best, best results for not necessarily just, well, here's some result will publish in an academic journal. That may not make the comparison. So I also think that the table to some extent is a reflection of your willingness to share the best results. And we'll be curious to see how better comparison can be made in the future when everybody starts sharing their best results as well. But I think quantum escape is definitely playing a very important leadership role here. I think the reason we do this is we get questions all the time from our investors. Okay, how do you guys compare to X or what do you think of why announcement that was just made. So we're trying to assemble the best kind of apples to apples comparison that we could. And you're right. There isn't really a standard of, you know, I get this many teraflops or something. There's not really a standard tests that everybody uses benchmark here. So we are just trying to compare what is published relative to automotive requirements. And then we do try and also put on all the slides of our test results. You know, pretty complete description of the test conditions here so that we're, it's not like we make a power cell for the power test and an energy cell for the energy test and a life cell for the life test it's, it's all the same architecture. Tim, I may have missed it, but I don't think I saw volumetric and graphometric energy density at cell level in the table I'm guessing it's not reported at all in the other findings I think. Yeah, what what we share is our target for the cell level here. These were targeting areas in here for commercial launch. When we make a one layer cell or even a four or 10 layer cell, the packaging is still a large fraction of the mass and volume of the cell. So the energy density of a one or even 10 layer cell is nothing to write home that it is not good, but our cell architecture and materials we believe are compatible with these targets and that's what we're aiming for once we get up to the dozens of layers. Thank you for the question, other questions. Yeah, the other is, I guess, question or maybe favor to everybody on this call. I think the call to action that that I'm requesting here is send us your best students your best researchers or come yourself. We're hiring a lot. There are a lot of challenges in front of us as we scale up to manufacturing, but it is, I think a globally important problem to solve this getting better batteries, not just for the automotive market and enable the transformation of the automotive market to electrification which, which is happening but also on the grid scale side as well. Equally large market equally important to climate change there's a lot of emissions, of course, just that that derive from electricity generation. And to get to high levels of penetration of solar and wind renewables you need to have energy storage so it's a globally important problem that I think we've got a pretty interesting solution that we're working on so I'd love to have all the best and brightest. Tim I will be very surprised if you don't get several job applications after this seminar. Great. So, I think team I think for the time consideration. Maybe we should close today's event where do you want to announce maybe let me ask one final high level question how about that. I think we'll really enjoy this. We won't, we won't let you go. We're learning so much. Tim, this is a question, an honest question from E&I and all the academics, I think less name. What, you know you have shown tremendous progress when focused working in a very disciplined manner, working on the high resource level of industry working on one problem. Can we academics do to support this in the meantime and certainly over the past 10 years there's been a lot of academic interest and solicit matters of all varieties. Of course we train great students and great people as you just mentioned, but in terms of fundamental insights and innovation. What would be your recommendation to academia what's your to say focus and processing, but what other recommendation can you make what do you find valuable what can we do to help. Yeah, the focus on processing is one training great students as you mentioned of the course of a huge contribution. You know the, I think the role of academia to generate fundamental insights in the mechanisms and discovering new materials is really a great role to play so. At the end of the day I think most technological challenges will boil down to a material science problem, you know, if you had a better material you could make something lighter and cheaper and stronger. So understanding the fundamentals is is a super valuable contribution, and we do read papers. One of the things I wasn't really in touch with as a grad student is how many people in industry and around the world do read papers I thought you know maybe publish a paper and it sits on a shelf in the library and nobody reads it but we do read paper so don't be discouraged about that. You know one other contribution that could be made I think is something I've talked to you a lot about will is in more statistics. So I went through undergrad masters PhD postdoc at Stanford all without any exposure to statistics, which as I now see things was a crime. When, especially when you're doing industrial R&D but I think even academic R&D, you should really try and quantify what is the certainty around your result. And statistics is the toolbox of how to quantify certainty or quantify uncertainty, which is so important when it comes to making the required judgment calls about what you should work on is how certain are you about the data that you have. So papers that get published with one sample are, you know, a little bit less trustworthy than papers that get published with more samples so that's another reason why we always try and show multiple samples on our charts to show that it's not just an error that can't be reproduced. Yeah, since so we'll ask where can I add a little bit based on your question so team. This is combining with my experience as well right. I think what I could come back to this question how academia can help. Oftentimes, there's a topic area like a new materials coming out. Once you publish that everybody else sees it, they're going to put the effort into that and also study that material from other people study. I just learned tremendously, you know, for my silicon and no lithium matter everything basically everything once you publish this always somebody else coming up different ideas and analyze that maybe deeper on on certain problem that come back to educate me. That might be something in that she can think about utilizing you know, National Lab University Academies and really throw that problem and then this exchange of idea the results in the published format can push the field forward you look at all the materials, whether it's MMC is leading my phosphate graphite. This will all involve in hundreds if not thousands of research group right so so that's, that's probably the way collective. I think intellectual contribution really pushed the field forward. I just added a little bit if you don't mind. Yeah, I agree and focus on commercially relevant problems I think is is also beneficial. So, I'm not saying that everything has to be very applied it can still be theoretical foundational work, but I think it really benefits to have a clear problem statement in mind. You know, if I solve this what impact is it going to have a lot of us are are in the engineering field so of course applications are paramount but even in battery science. So the tendency to branch out and study something new because maybe you can get a publication or distinguish distinguish yourself in a small emerging field, but a lot of these fields. I see them as kind of commercial dead ends. Now of course that's my own opinion and everybody should have their own opinion. Since you're asking me for ways to help industry that would be one of my opinions is, look at, you know, if I solve this problem what impact would it have in a practical application. Okay. Well, this is, these are really great and insightful comments. I'm going to resonate with, with all of them. And by the way, there is a course with your name on it. If you would like to give back to Stanford and come and teach. Let me, let me already post a title maybe something like living with errors, coping errors in energy technologies right I think that will be a great way for you to give back to to your alma mater. We look forward to having you here a lecture, hopefully soon. Thank you for your time permits. Wow, that's an honor. Thank you. Let's talk about that offline. All right, Tim, we really appreciate all the time you've spent today nearly two hours. We learned a lot, and I'm sure our audience is digesting all the information you have shared and thank you be. Thank you for being so forthcoming in getting into all the technical details. We really appreciate it. Thank you very much. I would like to invite everyone to visit our website as energy.stanford.edu. We have just posted a few weeks ago, all of the lecture recordings seminar recordings between March and June. Okay, so you can find this on our website and most of the recordings are now posted on YouTube. Please come and watch them and pause and take a look at the slides in great detail. And I think this is going to be a very useful resource to many of you. And then just to remind you to try to connect with us and follow us on LinkedIn. There are several additional student and postdoc web talks coming next week. Natalie and Washington from Mike Tony and Zen and Bouse groups will give talks on their, their PhD work. And then finally, for those of you who wish to gain broader exposure into energy topics. We do have our professional education program. So you can visit online.stanford.edu slash energy and take a multitude of courses including energy storage and coming soon electric vehicles. So with that, let me close today's seminar and think once again, Tim for his generosity with this time and E for co hosting. Thank you, everyone. Have a good day.