Here’s a tip for all you retrocomputing enthusiasts or even anyone with an old computer in the garage. Go remove the battery. Yes, that old mid-90s desktop has a battery inside for the real-time clock, and it’s a ticking time bomb. Batteries leak, and they’ll spew goo all over the circuit board, irreparably damaging your piece of electronic nostalgia. This goes for all electronics, too: that badge collection is going to be a pile of broken fiberglass in a decade. Remove your batteries now.

While lithium cells soldered to a motherboard will leak, now there might be a new technology that will allow our modern electronics to last for decades. It’s a solid state battery. The FDK Corporation is now handing out samples of a battery that looks like a large SMD cap. They come on tape and reel, and they’ll never leak.

Thanks to massive investments in battery research, batteries are getting more power-dense, and form factors are getting weird. Your AirPods need a battery somewhere, and manufacturers are figuring out the best way to put a battery into something that can be assembled by a pick and place machine. This battery is the answer to these problems, packing a 3.0 V, 140 μAh lithium cobalt pyrophosphate cell into a package that is just 4 mm by 2 mm by 2 mm. It’s a battery that looks a surface mount component, and it’s installed the same way: this is a pick-and-placeable battery.

While the capacity of this battery is tiny — a 1225 coin cell has a capacity of about 50 mAh, and this battery has a capacity of 140 μAh, three whole orders of magnitude smaller — sometimes that’s all you need. If you need a battery for a RTC, this SMD battery will work.