How do you manufacture millions of cells at a scale nobody's ever attempted? And how do you ensure people can wear these all around the world when every market has its own compliance standards? To walk me through it, I'm delighted to be joined by Karthik and Myuran. Welcome to Meta tech podcast.

Myuran: Hey, Pascal. Glad to be here.

Pascal: Okay, fantastic. Let's talk about you before we dive into the topic at hand here. Myuran, can we start with you? How long have you been at Meta, and what was your journey across the company?

Myuran: Yeah. Thanks Pascal for inviting us here today to talk about batteries. Something that both Karthik and I are super passionate about. I've been here at the company for almost eight years. I think around July will be my eighth year. We've worked in a lot of different areas as the evolution of our products has grown over time.

I've worked in batteries the entire time, so my team manages the technical program management team. We've got a large group of folks supporting all of the products. So, as we know, there are some VR products in the market, new AI glasses. So we've supported all of that and we've kind of seen the evolution from starting from these VR products to getting into glasses and whatnot.

So it's been an amazing journey over this time.

Pascal: That's what's really exciting, Karthik, and I pass it on to you.

Karthik: Sure. So I've been with Meta coming up on a little over nine years, and my team is responsible for the batteries across all the consumer electronic products at Meta. So, across all these products, my team does the chemistry development, the mechanical design, the electrical design, the algorithms, the validation, and then all the system integration.

Me personally, I started off as the first dedicated battery hire when Meta was making the transition from PCVR to mobile VR, and then over time, slowly and organically built out the team. Prior to this, I was at Apple for three years working on battery packs. And prior to that, I was at a semiconductor company called Texas Instruments, working on chargers, gauges, and protection ICs.

So the last 18 years of my career have been in batteries at different levels of abstraction.

Pascal: Well, yeah, it's hard to even believe that there was a time in Meta's history where we didn't build all these hardware products with built-in batteries. Amazing. So let's talk our listeners through the problem at hand here. So can one of you maybe describe to us the problem you were trying to solve when you attempted to move beyond the traditional pouch cells for something like our smart glasses?

Myuran: Yeah. Let me take that quickly and then maybe Karthik can follow. So, in pouch pouch batteries where we have traditional products like cell phones and laptop devices, you have a lot of space inside the device, right? There's quite a bit of volume there. And with that volume, you can stick a lot of battery, right?

There's a lot of space that you can fit energy with battery electrode volume and space, right? But the challenge with AI glasses and these smaller devices that we're starting to get into is the volume and space there is so limited.

You can just take a look at your own prescription glasses or your sunglasses. You can see the temple arms are so small, right? And how can we get to a place where we're running several hours of runtime for your device using only such a small volume of space?

And so, pouch batteries have some limitations on how much energy density and how much energy can we pack into that space. And what we had to do was develop this technology to get to that place where we could pack in more energy.

Maybe I'll hand it off to Karthik there and he could talk a bit more.

Karthik: Thanks Myuran. The main challenge we had to focus on was how do we efficiently use the volume of space given for battery? Unlike a cell phone or a laptop, the volume given to us is non cuboidal and is a three dimensional volume. And typical pouch cells, when you look at the fraction of volume used for the actual active material to the packaging is pretty small.

And then, as you keep getting smaller and smaller, that fraction becomes higher and higher. So the goal for us was, hey, how do we structurally change the battery so we spend less fraction of the volume on the packaging material and give it more to the active material? And so, steel can technology is one of the solutions there where we replace some of the actual pouch material by using steel can, which has better dimensional tolerance and which we can make thinner.

And the other aspect is, along with the packaging, we go to what is called a stacked electrodes, where we can start doing arbitrary shapes. So those are the two key insights into the technology that helped us pack more battery in the same small volume that's available on a temple arm.

Pascal: That's a great description of the problem, and I think it just makes intuitive sense that you just want to make use of all the available space that you have and the existing technologies weren't quite right for this. So, we are obviously an audio medium, and I'm sure there are some brilliant visual guides explaining how this all works, but could one of you potentially try to describe with words how these two attempts of structuring a battery differ?

Karthik: Alright, let me start with that. So, if you look at your traditional glasses, the temple arms for Ray-Ban glasses is this iconic shape that has a taper and then goes over your ears. If you used a traditional rectangular battery, then you're basically wasting a lot of space in that big trapezoid.

So the idea here is to change the shape of the battery to a trapezoid and use the full volume available on the temple arm. The other piece is that even a trapezoid can only go up to a certain length, and then you have the speaker and other components there. So what we were able to do is to go all the way up to the speaker, make a small notch in the battery so we can extend it all the way to the circular diaphragms of the speaker.

So that's the key insight here. So instead of using a rectangle, how about we use a trapezoid, and then we add notches in other shapes to jog over components in the temple arm to maximize the volume available for the battery.

Pascal: Got it. And inside the battery itself, how do the different approaches of layering or winding differ when you look inside?

Myuran: So in a traditional pouch battery, or even in some steel can batteries, what you see is you have three major components inside that hold the energy or create the chemistry reaction that saves or stores energy. You have an anode, a cathode, and a separator that isolates them from storing energy.

And so, in the traditional form, what you have is something called a jelly roll. And what that is, is like a long ribbon of anode, cathode, and separator. And they're just wound up together, and you flatten them to create kind of a rectangular shape, right? You can think of a toilet paper roll and you just smash it, it'll turn into a rectangle, right?

But what we are doing here to create kind of interesting shapes, as Karthik mentioned, is stamping or die cutting individual layers of anode, cathode, separator, and then stacking them on top of each other. And so, it's like a sandwich. That's what ends up happening. Instead of this toilet paper roll flattened, you have now these sandwich layers that are creating the energy, and then how do you join them together?

So in that toilet paper roll, you can imagine that the ribbon is all connected together. It's bound physically together to get them connected together. We actually have tabs on every single one of the layers, positive and negative tabs. Those tabs are then welded together and joined to create one unified body.

Also I can just show a little bit of the Ray-Ban Meta 2. As Karthik mentioned, it's not rectangular, and there's so much space gap there. Like at the angle where you have a trapezoid, if you were to fit just a perfect rectangle there, that bottom angle is just completely cut off.

You also have a small microphone in the corner of the temple arm. In both of those regions, what we did with these stacked electrodes is we created these trapezoid shapes with a small cutout. And that's able to maximize the volume for energy density inside of that space.

Karthik: Yeah, maybe a simple explanation, you know, like the stacked, uh, as Myuran said, jelly roll is like a toilet roll that's smashed together. Uh, stacked electrodes is stacks of, uh, tissue paper that's cut to a certain shape, and that can be made any shape as opposed to flattening a toilet roll.

Pascal: Got it. Okay. I think that gives us a good idea of the benefits of this particular approach. So, so far you've mentioned shape, but I've read that this also gives you benefits in terms of lower impedance. What does that actually provide for the devices it's powering?

Karthik: So one of the big challenges as batteries become smaller is that, not only do they need to provide energy to last all day, they also need to provide peak power for the use cases. What peak power means is when you're trying to have your camera provide AI context, download this videos, and at the same time, do all the compute when it's trying to recognise a QR code or an object.

So that's the peak power challenge with small batteries. Small batteries have high impedance because of the shape and the fact that the energy cannot be equally quickly pushed out through the electrodes. The main advantage of stacked electrodes is that each battery is made up of stacks of individual batteries.

So the way to think of that is you have all these little, little small cans that can quickly support, provide the energy, as opposed to this big reservoir trying to provide all the energy through a single hose. So the idea is you have these little, little batteries, each with individual hoses providing energy and providing the peak power instead of a big, large tank providing that same power through a small hose.

That's the main peak power challenge with these stacked electrodes help solve.

Myuran: So for those maybe techie people out there, if you think of a long electro jelly roll where you have a long ribbon, you can think of that as a resistor with, you know, very high resistance, right? It's a very large kind of resistance path that the ions and electrons have to pass through, right?

Now, if you take the individual stacks, what you have is kind of like a bunch of small resistors, but they're all connected in parallel, so you reduce the impedance dramatically, right? Like, that's kind of the idea and physics behind it.

Pascal: So, what actually happens to devices? Because that feels like it's not just a nice-to-have for a product like this. As you say, the entire use case here is that you have certain high power requiring use cases for the glasses.

So, what would happen if a battery wasn't up to that particular standard? Would you basically get like a mini brown out on the device?

Karthik: Yeah. So I think the main challenge here, if you're not designing the batteries for peak power and just for energy, is that certain applications will shut down early and you'll have brownouts. For example, your device might stop working in the middle of a video, or if you are trying to take a video and download it, the download might abruptly stop.

So when we design these small batteries for glasses and these AI products, the peak power design considerations are as much as in the forefront as the runtime and overall energy constraints.

Pascal: Right.

Myuran: It's particularly important when there's a high load, right? Like we are now integrating a lot of AI use cases into our smart glasses, and what will happen there is whenever you're taking a recording or maybe downloading while asking the Meta AI a question, that's a lot of power being demanded at an instantaneous time, and that will cause the device to brown out.

Pascal: For sure. So in terms of tolerances, how does it differ when you have a steel can battery versus the old pouch style battery?

Karthik: Yeah, a typical pouch battery, which was used in our first two generations of products, was about 10 mm wide, and the tolerance was about plus or minus 0.5 mm. So if you think about that, that's basically a 10% energy being lost just for tolerances. In a steel can battery, because of steel and the way it's machined, we can get to about a hundred microns precision over the same 10 mm battery. So we've gone from a 10% precision to a 1% precision on the tolerances of these batteries. That itself is an inherent energy boost.

Myuran: You can think of, like a pouch battery has a lot of packaging material, right? Like, so again, the name of this game is to pack in as much electrode as you can inside of a volume, right? But to deliver that electrode energy, you have to package it somehow, either with a pouch, aluminium pouch, or with a steel can. And with the pouches, if you've ever seen a traditional pouch battery, maybe like a cell phone, you'll see that it has all this kind of interesting origami. It's like a bag, essentially. You can think of it like a potato chip bag or something like that. You put the jelly roll or the stack inside of this bag, and then you need to fold up the sides and seal it completely, right?

So like if you think of a single piece of aluminium, punch out two cups in it so that you can put a jelly roll in it, and then fold it over, when you fold it over, one edge will be sealed, but then you have three edges that are not sealed, right? So all three of those edges eventually have to be laminated or sealed, and then you have this extra material on all three of those sides. So they need to be folded accordingly or kind of origami'd up.

That's wasted space in the end. Even if you do a really good job of that folding and kind of pressing it up against the side of the cell or the front, you're just wasting a lot of space. But that's where the steel can is really valuable. There is no folding, right? We just take a tub and a lid, weld them together, then you don't have this extra packaging space there. That's where you get the energy density gains.

Pascal: So for the Oakley Vanguards, you somehow decided that you didn't have enough challenges and you ended up putting two batteries in there, which makes sense given how we've discussed how you want to maximise all the different spaces that you have in there. But that means now you have like two batteries in each temple arm and slightly asymmetric loads as well.

Because as you've discussed before, there might be different pieces of hardware in there, like microphones on one side. So how do you stop these tiny batteries from fighting with each other?

Karthik: Right. So the Oakley Vanguards had an interesting challenge in that, what they call the length of the temple arm is very small. So the length of temple arm is usually defined from the hinge all the way to the end tip. So it's a very small thing compared to your regular Wayfarer, which goes over the ear.

The Oakley fit is that straight cut fit, which is very different from the glasses. So from the system level, we did not have just enough length to package enough components in terms of batteries or microphones or cameras. So at the system level, they decided to put all the electronics in front of the hinge — in the front frame itself.

So the temple arm itself has only two components: the speaker, the battery, and a few buttons. So when we saw that architecture, we realised that there was no way we could maintain the day of use and the peak power requirements just using one battery. The solution to that was to go with distributed batteries, where we have two batteries: one on the left and one on the right temple arm.

And each of these power different subsystems. But from a holistic point of view, it's like the two batteries are operating in union. The key challenge here was we had, the battery on the left and the right as the same. So you have symmetric batteries, but with asymmetric loads. Where, on one side, you have the wifi chip set pulling a slightly different power, and on the other side, you have the main system on chip that's pulling a different level power.

So along with the actual hardware development of doing the steel can batteries to the left and the right, we needed to bring in the next layer of software to dynamically manage both the battery in day-to-day use and overall, in terms of what we call the various state management. The states include, you know, what do you do for state of charge, state of power, and then dynamically allocate the battery power to do this.

So that was another level of complexity we had to figure out on top of the hardware complexity.

Pascal: Right. I would imagine just the battery percentage display is something that is not purely math space, but really something where you need to think about how do you communicate this to the user without being very overwhelming.

Karthik: Correct. Myuram, you wanna take this?

Myuran: Yeah, and I think some of the algorithms that Karthik's team has been developing, right? Like it's very important over the life of these two batteries on how do they age and also how do we charge them and balance them very equally, right? You don't want one product or one of these batteries, you know, one year or two years after you've been using it, to be performing better or worse than the other, right?

So again, we have these algorithms to make sure that when, in real time, as we're charging and discharging the batteries, that they're balancing. And also, we're taking a look at their health, their impedance growth over time, their ageing, to make sure that they're kind of like equally providing performance through the life of the product.

Karthik: I think another thing you touched on, Pascal, is, you know, unlike the, uh, true wireless earbuds where it shows, hey, it's the left battery and the right battery, the glasses are a different product, where people want to see what your glasses battery is and not what the left battery and right battery is.

So my team developed algorithms to fuse the state of charge of both the batteries and show unified, holistic, single battery state of charge for the glasses and not left and right numbers.

Pascal: Yeah, exactly that. It feels like you wouldn't think about this. You see one number somewhere in your companion app or on the device, and you would never think how much effort goes into just calculating this one number, so it actually reflects the true state of the device.

Karthik: Yeah, I think you put it very precisely. We just want it to be seamless to the user. And so, complexity like left and right or something, it's not, we should be taking care and give the user a magical experience.

Pascal: For sure. Speaking of magical, so the Meta Ray-Ban Display is the first set of AI glasses that we have with a built-in display. What kind of challenges did that provide you with?

Myuran: Yeah, I think there, too, there's particularly a lot of interest around this brownout talk, right? Again, you don't want the display running some very heavy loads where you have a bright screen or you're taking a photo or maybe a realtime video plus asking an AI question. So there, too, we had to be really careful about characterising the impedance of the cell.

Luckily, here we are also doing a steel can battery, so the impedance is quite low. That's very important, kind of like one of the important principles for this particular battery. So, yeah, Karthik, you can speak more to it.

Karthik: Yeah, so the Meta Ray-Ban Display is basically a constellation of three different batteries. There is the battery in the glasses, there's the battery in the wrist device, and then there's the battery in the case. And interestingly, all three use very different technologies, but we want to hide that complexity to give the user a seamless experience.

On the glasses, we have the steel can batteries. And the main challenge there was to make sure that we do not have any peak power issues with the display. The display can, the user can change the display brightness. And all those things have to dynamically make sure that the battery is not browning out.

The wrist device now is another source of input. So, even if you're not using the device or taking a picture, it's constantly communicating with your wrist device. So there is complexity there that has to be managed.

And the other challenge is to show all three battery capacities seamlessly to the user, both in the app and on device.

Pascal: Absolutely. This is so interesting to me because it just opens up a completely different way for me to think about the devices I interact with every day. If I launch a few apps on my phone or on my iPad, I might think about like, oh yeah, my battery is gonna drain faster as I do this. But it never really occurred to me that there might be a scenario if, unthrottled, I would open or perform all of these actions at once. It might actually be consuming more power than the battery can provide. And without further checks and balances in the system, it would just brown out.

This is a really interesting way of thinking about the challenge that I feel like most of us out here who don't work in the battery space, just never even consider.

Myuran: This device also was one of the bigger driving factors behind wanting to allot a lot of energy density, right, in a small space. Because of the display consuming a lot of power, right, we really needed a battery that was able to provide a high energy density. And again, this product only has a single battery versus two because of space limitation.

So in that very tiny space, we had to come up with a technology that was able to deliver several hours of runtime with a display. So steel can kind of made that happen.

Pascal: Right. Okay. So, so far, I think we've primarily talked about the design of all of this and what it enabled, but I also want to really talk about the production of it. Because, as you've said, this is effectively a one-of-a-kind piece of engineering that hasn't been done before.

So how do you even go about just standing up a brand new manufacturing line for this, which doesn't just need to provide you a prototype, but clearly ended up in millions of devices that shipped to consumers?

Myuran: The challenge that we faced at the very beginning of this steel can manufacturing was one where we're going to stacking, which was a little bit unique. It is there in the industry, but it is unique compared to jelly rolls. So manufacturing lines don't exist in ubiquity for stacking.

And then the next challenge was to get to this super narrow form factor, right, down to maybe lower than eight millimetre kind of width, right? So doing that and having high precision, on taking a new sandwich and sticking that into a steel can in such a small form factor, without any crashes, with safety in mind. And also at a very high UPH, right, or units per hour. Because we're producing these batteries and these glasses in fairly high volumes, as we know, the glasses have become quite popular. So that challenge to getting to a very unique jelly roll that's narrow, having high precision at a high-speed manufacturing, and highly repeatable with a lot of automation was a huge challenge.

So we worked with our suppliers on working through, like, what are the processes to take some of the traditional battery manufacturing principles, to extrapolating that over to these ultra narrow steel cans, and then having to scale that to multiple manufacturing lines. So over the course of the last couple of years, as we got closer to launching the AI glasses, we were able to scale to, from one manufacturing line as a prototype first, as a golden line automation, proving out everything; going through many builds to validate, test, and make sure everything was okay; to scaling that up to four manufacturing lines and even more for the future, right?

So it was a huge amount of effort to get there. Maybe one more point before I hand it over to Karthik. The, another kind of unique thing about the ultra narrow steel can manufacturing is that it requires a lot of welding, right? So with the pouch cells, again, you're doing a lot of folding and origami and let's say glueing steps and things like that.

But here, it's a lot of precision welding. You, again, you have a tub for the jelly roll to fit inside of, and then you have a lid, and that has to be perfectly welded, like a battery. Again, there's electrolyte in there. You don't want it to be leaking. You have to bring out the positive and negative electrodes, right?

So we have a special rivet, also, that kind of seals the hole and makes sure that it doesn't leak. So the welding processes there are really, really, really fine kind of manufacturing principles and processes. So that's also something that we spent a lot of time working through over the years.

Karthik: Yeah. In terms of like the actual manufacturing aspect, there were probably like three or four main challenges that we had to face.

First, to start off, is actually the material handling of these really thin electrodes, both from a size perspective in terms of like the X and y dimension actually thickness.

These foils are in the order of less than 10 microns, a few microns thick, and then handling these reliably, and then creating a sandwich that's probably like 14 layers thick has been one of the key challenges. So once you have this stack that you've been able to manufacture and precisely align, placing it inside the steel can was also another precision step. You can always make the steel can much bigger than the electrode stack, so you can put it in, but then you're wasting space with all the tolerance. The whole idea was how it's the minimum thing you can do.

Once you've taken this complicated sandwich and placed it inside the steel can, the next big challenge is how do you close the tub? That's where the laser welding process comes.

So the key challenges was material handling, placement inside this really small cavity, and then sealing the cavity by laser welding. And so there, we have to develop techniques — both two dimensional and three dimensional welding — to make sure we can create a perfect seal.

And then once you've made the cell, now how do you connect that to the pack and to the connectors? So there's another set of welding steps that need to happen.

So the, I try to bracket three main things, like, you know, how do you handle thin floppy things that are like PA pieces of paper or stamps. And then once you've made your sandwich, how do you put your sandwich perfectly inside millions of times? And then once you've made that sandwich and put it inside your box, how do you seal that up to go to the next step?

Those are some of the main challenges we had to do. It was a journey over two to three years where, every time we would face a challenge, we would figure it out. And then now, we basically scale the line to produce millions of batteries.

Pascal: Given that you'd say two to three years, I just keep thinking about how I, as a software engineer, have the benefit of changing a few lines of code, pressing a button, and seconds to minutes later, I have my result visible to me. What does it actually feel like when you invest so much of your life and your professional career into something, and then you wait for years to actually have something in your hand to see it? What is it like when you actually hold it for the first time and look at it?

Karthik: Yeah, it's a thing of beauty basically. Yeah. Like, you get, you know, you do, the software people get to do four builds per day. We get four shots at goal over 18 months. So it's definitely a different feeling when you see the first piece of thing work. And then, and it, the first thing working is just the beginning. And then you have to go make sure you can manufacture it at scale, on time, at cost. And those are three things which take even longer.

We've been through both the initial journey of making the first device, but more importantly, scaling it and making it at a price point that's accessible.

Myuran: It is truly like a journey, too, I think Pascal. Like, I would say that that's really important and part of kind of the design and development process, right? So in the very early days, this started as just a challenge, right? It started as a problem that we had with how do you fit energy in a strange shape? And, and where did that come from? Was the Ray-Ban Metas, right? So like, they always had the previous generation, Ray-Ban Meta one, had a pouch cell and it was a rectangle. And then there was all these asks from our leadership, including Mark Z. He, he really wanted to see how can we take this form factor and improve for our customers, right? How can we provide longer runtime?

And so, we created this as a concept in the very, very early days. Just kind of a manually done steel can, you know, manual welding, all of this kind of stuff to create a prototype to say, hey, we can do this in an interesting shape and it can fit in like our previous generation Ray-Ban Meta one. So we could be doing this in future generation things with different shapes.

So it just started there. And even those early days, having those demos just to show and kind of prove out that shapes are possible, steel can is possible, was really fascinating and exciting. And it made us really want to see, like, how can we get this to launch? And the thing is, it's hard to have patience at that moment, right? You know, it's gonna take something like two or three years to scale manufacturing lines to get this so precise, to have the tolerances, right? But yeah, I think it comes from an idea at the beginning and a challenge. Very exciting.

Pascal: Yeah, absolutely fascinating. Another big difference between my model of working on an app on my machine is that you are working with people all across the world. So I guess like most of the collaborations will be with suppliers in Asia. Do you have like a specific moment in your mind when you think about some of the hardest, nobody has done this before moments and what you ended up doing to unlock the progress there?

Karthik: I think one of the key challenges that we faced when we started this program was, how do you design these rivets? The goal is basically the rivet is the little nub-like thing on the cell that allows the positive terminal to come out. Whereas the whole can body is the negative terminal.

And one of the challenges we faced was, these are sunglass products. So people are gonna use them outside and they're gonna bring it inside. So there's gonna be a lot of thermal cycling that's going on. And the rivet itself has a piece of metal and then has various pieces of rubber. And when we started testing these for the actual use cases, we started seeing that, after a few thermal cycles, the rivet would start leaking.

And so, that was one of the main challenges that we had to face to work through. And that was, that included material science, that included mechanical design, and also involved developing test methodologies on how do you test these new rivets. There was, at that time, there was no in-house knowledge, and the vendor base did not understand how do we do this?

So a lot of people on my team across cell engineering, mechanical engineering, and supplier quality had to go one level upstream from, not just the cell vendor, up to the can vendor and go spend time at the can vendors site and say, hey, how are you actually manufacturing this? How are you assembling this? And then how do we test this?

And there was also a lot of know-how developed on testing it for, in a, in a lab scale for one or few devices, and then testing it on the manufacturing line where we have to do top millions of devices and testing it at scale. So that was probably one of the biggest challenges we had to face to figure out how to make these rivets.

Pascal: That's absolutely fascinating because even if you nailed it all for something like a VR headset, most people don't take them to the beach. And all of these additional problems you've just mentioned just are the result of the unique form factor that you're now also working with. So it is so fascinating how many layered challenges you're facing.

And Myuran, did you want to add something to this as well?

Myuran: Yeah, I would say some of the supplier challenges, let's put aside the technical piece. Of course, this was, you know, totally new to the world to have a, you know, a flangeless kind of steel can battery that is stacked and so narrow. That was, of course, tremendously challenging. But one of the pieces at the very beginning was just to convince the suppliers to work with us, right?

So, so, I mean, you can imagine, right? Again, cell phone is a huge industry and the volumes are massive. There's a lot of profitability to be had there in that partnership. But here we were pitching before AI glasses were, became more ubiquitous as they are today. It was a really hard vision to pitch, to say like, hey, this is an important product. It's an important industry. It's an important space that people are gonna be using every day throughout their daily lives. And that this can be a huge volume play for them. In addition, too, those technologies can be leveraged in other places.

So this partnership was something that we had to work over time to kind of talk about the benefits, talk about how we could scale it, partner with them on even the manufacturing lines to say, hey, we will do this together in partnership to kind of create these technologies that everybody can scale in the end, right? Like, this is technology that can be used in other spaces, like, let's say for VR or whatnot.

So that, too, was a big challenge, and I think, as you guys can all see, now we have these glasses, so we were able to successfully convince them on the vision of, you know, AI glasses for the future.

Pascal: Yeah. Hard to even imagine. Meta knocks on your door and they're like, huh, I'm not sure about this. But it's fascinating where these challenges arise.

Myuran: I can remember some of those talks where like our GSM partners would, our global supply manager partners, would talk with them about like, oh, you know, here's a video of like a day in the life of a user wearing a pair of glasses, you know, going out to the skate park or whatever it is, and asking it, you know, how's the weather today in real time? And them just looking at us like, is that a real use case? Is that actually gonna happen?

So just convincing them that this is something that could be real and practical for people. So yeah.

Pascal: Is there a potential benefit in hindsight to this process as well? Because I feel like this also imposes a lot of rigour back on you, of making sure that your vision and your designs are actually completely ironclad and make sense end-to-end.

Karthik: Yeah, it took us, like, this was like the second time we had to do this. When we made the transition from PCVR to mobile VR, people were very skittish of putting these huge batteries next to somebody's eyes and face. And so, that took a lot of convincing and bringing people, especially the suppliers, along for the journey that Meta is doing the right thing in terms of testing and the rigour that we do in terms of quality management and development, but also bring them along for the vision of the product.

Myuran: Well, one thing that really helped, I think, sell the idea, too. Again, we were pitching a lot of technologies that are combined together in a kind of one solution, right? So that, along with the vision, made it really hard for them to think that this is scalable and even possible. So something that Karthik's team has developed over time in partnership with my team on develop development processes is something called a new technology introduction.

So we do some work upfront to validate these new technologies. And we can start out with small projects, right? So convincing the suppliers like, hey, let's just do a, some work on, let's say, a steel can laser welding. Or let's just do a pouch cell first with some stacked electrodes and prove that that's possible.

So we started with these small projects to kind of convince them that, hey, this concept is feasible. And that slowly developed the relationship and got us moving. So, yep.

Pascal: Sure. Okay. One last area I want to talk about, and I promise you this will be the last software analogy I make, but this is how I ground myself in this material that I'm generally not very native to. So if I want to publish a new piece of software that has never been done before, I usually might need to go through a bunch of just kind of privacy and other reviews for it.

But in the end, I press a button, and it goes out there. But this is very different when you're introducing a brand new piece of hardware where there are laws all around the world of how you actually get the right, I guess, like little compliance logos that we are all familiar with onto it. What's the process like if you're going into new market with this new type of battery?

Myuran: Yeah, the compliance piece of this is also super important. So I think I missed this up front. My team also manages the compliance of both batteries and also the device levels. So what does that entail?

So for every market, you've seen, I'm sure, the little UL markings or CE markings on your products or consumer electronics devices. What does that mean?

For retail sale in a particular country or a particular market, there are some standards to which both batteries and also devices must meet in terms of testing, validation, performance, and safety. So what we do is work with some third-party agencies and labs that are experts basically, or certified to grant these certifications, and take our devices through some testing and rigour to qualify and make sure that they meet like a certain bar before you get them out to consumers, right?

So some testing I can speak to on, like, what do they do? It ranges from things like electrical compliance to making sure things like brownout don't occur. Making sure that, when we say there's a minimum capacity on the labels, that we're meeting a specific capacity for the battery.

Even things that are mechanical, like drop-shock vibration. You can imagine like when these products are shipped from their manufacturing sites to your store, there's a lot of shock and vibration that happens, either in a truck or inside of an aeroplane or whatnot. And the devices still need to be reliable and perform, right?

So there are different shock profiles, drop profiles, mechanical profiles that are tested and validated to make sure that the devices are still performing well. Aand yeah, so we partner with those labs closely. We kind of monitor the testing. If anything does have an issue, we go back to the drawing board on design and make sure that we kind of address that issue, and then go back through this validation cycle and loop to make sure that we qualify the products for each market.

Pascal: Was there a market that provided any unique challenges?

Myuran: Yeah, so every country and every region goes through a lot of, you know, they, they have different processes, different testing. Some countries require that you use labs that are managed by their governments and locally tested, whereas some other places, they will use accredited labs. For example, we could test in Asia or in the US and then provide them with a document that says this is sealed and qualifies, and then they grant a certificate.

India was particularly challenging. There's a very long process to certifying the battery on its own. Then, taking the battery certifications to allow the device to go through its hardware, electrical testing. Then there's a wireless portion that has to go on for Bluetooth wireless RF and safety kind of testing that happens.

Finally, then that goes to kind of like the government on, on, on the India's side to check out where were the devices manufactured? Who were the manufacturers? Are they allowable manufacturers? Then finally, kind of granting their certificate.

It's quite a long process. It can take upwards of 12 or more weeks to just get that certification process. So you can imagine, you know, launching a product in just a two-year timeframe kind of becomes really challenging. So, yeah.

Pascal: Absolutely fascinating, and I wish I could ask you more questions because, despite this not being necessarily my area of expertise, this has been really, really interesting. But for now, I can only thank you for enabling a brand new product category for all of us and, of course, for joining me here on Meta Tech podcast.

Karthik: Thank you for having us, Pascal. We really appreciate it, and we really enjoyed talking about batteries.

Myuran: I hope other people find this interesting, Pascal. Batteries are really close and dear to our hearts, so hope it's interesting to the folks that are listening. Thank you.

Pascal: I'm sure I'm not the only one who's fascinated by all of this, so thank you so much.