Enovix Corporation, a manufacturer of advanced silicon lithium-ion batteries, announced on July 26 that it had established Enovix Research and Development Services India Private Limited in Hyderabad. The Enovix India team will develop sophisticated models to predict battery performance and aid in the manufacturing and design of next-generation batteries.
The company produces batteries for the Internet of Things, mobile and computing devices, and automobiles. The company’s innovative architecture, without jeopardising safety, enables batteries with a high energy density and capacity. Enovix is expanding its silicon-anode lithium-ion battery production capacity to accommodate customer demand. Enovix and its rival Amprius ell batteries with 100 per cent active silicon anodes, and Enovix possesses 141 patents. The total lithium-ion battery market is indeed $75 billion in 2025, according to Avicenne Research.
Dr Raj Talluri, President and Chief Executive Officer of Enovix, said that the region is a strategic location for the company due to its extensive pool of technical talent in disciplines crucial to its long-term success and business-friendly environment.
Enovix India will assist the U.S. and Malaysian product and manufacturing teams. Enovix India will be led by Dr Chandra Saru Saravanan, who joined the company as a consultant in 2021 and has been working on this initiative. Before joining Enovix, he served as Senior Vice President at Reliance Industries Limited in Mumbai, where he implemented cutting-edge crude-oil characterisation technologies and advanced modelling, including Machine Learning, to enhance and optimise business and manufacturing processes. Before his 2008 move to India, he was the Chief Scientist at Nanometrics in Milpitas, California. Dr. Saravanan has a PhD in Computational Chemistry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a B.Tech. in Chemical and Electrochemical Engineering from the Central Electrochemical Research Institute in Tamil Nadu.
On the same day, the company announced it had signed a Master Service Agreement with YBS International Berhad, a Malaysian investment holding company whose business segments include, among others, electronic manufacturing and assembly, high-precision engineering, precision machining and stamping. The agreement secures non-dilutive financing of $70 million to support Enovix’s Fab2 site in Penang, Malaysia, and its first Gen2 high-volume production line.
The business is preparing for high-volume production in Malaysia the following year. Over twenty process, product, and equipment engineers who will work at Fab2 in Penang arrived in Fremont in May for Fab1 training, said the company in its second quarter financial results release. This group will return to Asia later this year to supervise Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT) at the company’s vendors and Site Acceptance Testing (“SAT”) in Malaysia when Gen2 equipment arrives at Fab2’s site.
According to the release, Enovix has established smartphone partnerships with prominent OEMs Xiaomi, Vivo, and Lenovo. According to IDC, Xiaomi and Vivo were among the top five smartphone OEMs worldwide regarding dispatches in 2022. Statcounter Global Stats statistics show that Lenovo’s Motorola brand held the No. 3 market share position among mobile vendors in the United States during the second quarter.
IDC predicts that the number of flip and fold phones will increase by more than 50 per cent to 21,4 million units this year. As a result, the company plans to offer batteries with a higher energy density so that OEMs can use one high-capacity battery to power their large, foldable screens rather than two conventional batteries on each side. This would enable smartphone manufacturers to reduce the size and complexity of their products without sacrificing battery life.
In addition to producing high energy-density batteries, the company believes that its innovative silicon battery design could facilitate faster charging than conventional graphite-based cells. This is due to its thinner anode, which allows for faster lithium diffusion, its use of silicon, which has a higher buffer to prevent lithium plating during charge and better kinetics for lithiation; and the company’s unique architecture, which allows for greater thermal conductivity. The company has devoted additional R&D to developing rapid charging for its target markets, specifically smartphones.
