How Meta Engineered Ultra-Narrow Batteries for AI Glasses
How Meta Engineered Ultra-Narrow Batteries for AI Glasses
Meta 如何为 AI 眼镜设计超窄电池
Smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta Vanguards need to pack enough energy to power features like cameras, speakers, AI workloads, and even a display. But it all has to fit into the glasses’ temple arms. So how do you place a battery with enough power to run a pair of smart glasses all day into a form factor narrower than an adult’s pinky finger? You have to rethink how batteries are made. In episode 86 of the Meta Tech Podcast, host Pascal Hartig sat down with Karthik and Myuran, the engineers behind Meta’s steel can battery technology, for a conversation on powering the newest and next generation of wearables.
像 Ray-Ban Meta 和 Oakley Meta Vanguards 这样的智能眼镜，需要足够的能量来驱动摄像头、扬声器、AI 工作负载甚至显示屏等功能。但所有这些组件都必须塞进眼镜的镜腿中。那么，如何将一块足以支撑智能眼镜全天运行的电池，放入一个比成年人小指还要窄的外形尺寸中呢？你必须重新思考电池的制造方式。在 Meta Tech Podcast 第 86 期节目中，主持人 Pascal Hartig 与 Meta 钢壳电池技术的幕后工程师 Karthik 和 Myuran 进行了对话，探讨了如何为最新一代及下一代可穿戴设备提供动力。
Why Traditional Batteries Fall Short for Smart Glasses
为什么传统电池无法满足智能眼镜的需求
Traditional pouch cells — the batteries in most phones and laptops– can’t cut it for devices like smart glasses because they’re difficult to reshape and shrink down. Their folds waste volume, their tolerances eat into precious millimeters of space, and at smaller sizes they can difficulty providing peak power for multitasking (for example, if someone is using the camera and asking the AI model to perform a task at the same time). Smart glasses need a battery that can claim every micron of space – something rigid, precise, and shaped to the product rather than the other way around.
传统的软包电池（大多数手机和笔记本电脑中使用的电池）无法满足智能眼镜等设备的需求，因为它们难以重塑和缩小尺寸。它们的折叠部分浪费了体积，公差占用了宝贵的毫米级空间，而且在尺寸较小时，它们难以提供多任务处理所需的峰值功率（例如，当用户同时使用摄像头并要求 AI 模型执行任务时）。智能眼镜需要一种能够利用每一微米空间的电池——它必须是坚固、精确的，并且是根据产品形状来定制的，而不是反过来。
Enter Steel-Can Cells (at Never-Before-Seen Widths)
引入钢壳电池（前所未有的宽度）
Steel-can batteries aren’t new. Power tools and watches use them. But Meta’s AI glasses needed batteries with widths as narrow as 7mm, narrower than anything that existed before. Getting there meant rethinking nearly every internal component of the battery.
钢壳电池并不新鲜，电动工具和手表都在使用它们。但 Meta 的 AI 眼镜需要宽度窄至 7 毫米的电池，这比以往任何现有的电池都要窄。要实现这一目标，意味着必须重新思考电池内部的几乎每一个组件。
The Electrode Architecture
电极架构
Traditional steel-can cells use a wound “jelly roll” of electrode material. Meta’s engineers replaced that with die-cut stacked layers, similar to wiring small resistors in parallel. The result is dramatically lower impedance, which matters when peak power is required so that the device can avoid brownouts if a lot of power is being demanded at the same time (because someone may be making a recording while asking the AI a question at the same time).
传统的钢壳电池使用卷绕式的“果冻卷”电极材料。Meta 的工程师将其替换为模切堆叠层，类似于并联小型电阻器。其结果是阻抗显著降低，这在需要峰值功率时至关重要，从而使设备在同时需求大量电力时（例如用户在录制视频的同时向 AI 提问）能够避免电压骤降。
Tolerances
公差
A steel-can cell holds its shape to roughly 100 microns. On a 10mm-wide battery, that gives back real usable volume that translates directly into additional energy density and runtime.
钢壳电池的形状保持在约 100 微米的精度内。在 10 毫米宽的电池上，这节省出了实际可用的体积，直接转化为额外的能量密度和续航时间。
New Challenges With Each Generation
每一代产品带来的新挑战
From Gen 1 to Gen 2 the Meta Ray-Ban’s, cell capacity grew from 160 mAh to 210 mAh — roughly a 30 percent bump. Yet the product shipped with claims of double the runtime. The chemistry didn’t change. The extra gains came from system-level efficiency improvements across hardware and software such as better power management, tighter firmware control, and a form factor that allowed for a larger cell.
从第一代到第二代 Meta Ray-Ban 眼镜，电池容量从 160 mAh 增加到 210 mAh，增幅约为 30%。然而，该产品发布时宣称续航时间翻倍。电池化学成分并未改变，额外的提升来自于硬件和软件层面的系统级效率改进，例如更好的电源管理、更严格的固件控制，以及允许容纳更大电池的外形设计。
The Oakley Meta Vanguards actually feature a battery in each temple arm, which introduced a real systems puzzle at the intersection of electrical, firmware, and mechanical engineering. The cells in each temple arm are symmetric, but the electronic loads aren’t split evenly between the two sides. That creates cross-charging risks and sequencing complexity at boot and shutdown. Then the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses introduced the most demanding power profile yet. Its screen draws sustained power rather than short bursts, which required designing a 248 mAh steel-can cell, the largest in Meta’s lineup.
Oakley Meta Vanguards 在每个镜腿中都配备了电池，这在电气、固件和机械工程的交叉领域带来了一个真正的系统难题。每个镜腿中的电池是对称的，但电子负载在两侧分配并不均匀。这导致了交叉充电风险以及启动和关机时的时序复杂性。随后，Meta Ray-Ban 显示屏眼镜引入了迄今为止要求最高的电源配置。其屏幕需要持续供电而非短时脉冲供电，这需要设计出一款 248 mAh 的钢壳电池，这是 Meta 产品线中容量最大的一款。
More Power to the Wearables
为可穿戴设备提供更多动力
The ultra-narrow steel-can approach we developed for our smart glasses is proving adaptable to other form factors across Meta’s hardware portfolio. Meta is now focused on scaling and democratizing this technology across multiple vendors, ensuring we have resilient supply and can bring these batteries to the next generation of wearables.
我们为智能眼镜开发的超窄钢壳电池方案，已被证明适用于 Meta 硬件组合中的其他外形尺寸。Meta 目前正致力于在多个供应商之间扩展和普及这项技术，确保我们拥有稳健的供应链，并将这些电池应用于下一代可穿戴设备。
Listen to the full episode to hear the complete story — from first sketch to global shelf — including details on cross-charging two-battery systems, software versus hardware iteration cycles, and what it’s really like to collaborate across time zones to build something the world has never seen.
收听完整节目以了解全部故事——从最初的草图到全球上架——包括双电池系统交叉充电的细节、软件与硬件迭代周期的对比，以及跨时区协作打造前所未有的产品是怎样的体验。