When a solid-state battery news appears, check which stage of the roadmap it refers to — how to count the five obstacles listed in the 2026 solid electrolyte roadmap paper and 51 patents of Toyota and Samsung SDI

In a solid-state battery where the liquid electrolyte is replaced with a solid, the solid component is called a solid electrolyte. We checked the 12 national research grants and 51 Japanese published patent applications disclosed 18 months later, along with the roadmap paper written by 30 people who gathered to determine where the next 10 years will go.

This is an article that checks, according to the original text notation, who funded this research, not an article that evaluates the science of the paper. All references can be verified through original text links.

Read the paper.

Title

2026 roadmap on next-generation solid electrolytes for battery applications

Publication

Materials FuturesMaterials Futures
Journal · Website 5(3) 033001 · IOP PublishingIOP Publishing
Publisher · Website

DOI

10.1088/2752-5724/ae5120

Date

CrossrefCrossref
Data source · Website registration 2026-03-12 · Online publication 2026-05-04 · Print publication 2026-09-01

License

CC BY 4.0 · Diamond open access (neither authors nor readers pay)

Authors

30 · 21 institutions · 11 countries

Verification date

2026-09-16

What would change if this happens — what the paper directly states

The batteries currently in use contain flammable liquid, and the root cause of incidents such as phones swelling or fires in electric vehicles lies in this. A solid electrolyte refers to the idea of replacing that flammable liquid with a solid mass. The abstract of this paper lists three benefits of making this change.

• Safety. The flammable liquid is eliminated.
• Stronger materials can be used. In the abstract's phrasing, it is described as "a path toward high-voltage cathodes and metallic anode chemistry." In simpler terms, more electricity can be stored in the same volume. The driving range of electric vehicles and the time spent at charging stations depend on this.
• Recycling. A design that allows used batteries to be disassembled and reused becomes possible. The abstract explicitly mentions "circular design and recyclability," and recycling is also listed as the final item in the roadmap.

However, the abstract also comprehensively lists five obstacles that block this path. These include ionic conductivity, which refers to how well lithium ions move through the solid, and electrochemical stability, which is the property of the electrolyte not degrading during charging and discharging. Additionally, manufacturing, processes, and costs are included. The abstract states that these five factors are interrelated, and improving one often worsens another. This single line explains why progress has been slow for over a decade.

Not a new experiment but a compilation of directions written by 30 people

The roadmap paper is not a paper presenting new experimental results but a format where multiple researchers in the field gather to write item-by-item what has been achieved so far and what needs to be solved in the future. Since it is a format that gathers multiple people's views in one place, 30 people from 21 institutions are listed as authors of this paper.

The scope outlined in the abstract does not remain confined to a single material or a single category, but summarizes where sulfide and halide solid electrolytes using lithium and sodium have reached so far, and also examines the next chemicals such as potassium and magnesium. Progress in hydridoborates, fully reduced electrolytes that do not accept more electrons, high-entropy electrolytes made by mixing multiple elements at once, and advances in glass-ceramic electrolytes follow. The discussion extends beyond materials to include mass production processes, rapid synthesis, machine learning, in-situ analysis, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, ending with recycling and circular design.

The authors wrote that the electrolyte should be viewed not as a passage but as a component.

What this roadmap ultimately argues can be understood without reading the entire text. It is summarized in a single sentence at the very end of the abstract.

고체전해질은 앞으로 수동 부품에서 벗어나 고에너지밀도 전기화학 시스템의 능동적 설계 요소로 점차 진화할 것이다.초록 마지막 부분을 필자가 옮겼다

For a long time, the electrolyte has been treated as a passive component merely serving as a passage for ions. This paper places the property of the electrolyte itself to give and receive electrons, that is, the property to participate in oxidation and reduction, in an important position, which is referred to as redox activity in English. It is a call to design the electrolyte not as a passage but as a component.

There are three things that cannot be confirmed by this roadmap.

• A roadmap is not a measurement. Since it is a paper that collects the opinions of thirty people, the correctness of the directions written here cannot be confirmed by this paper.
• Citations are still at 5 (as of 2026-09-16 OpenAlexOpenAlex
  Data source · Website). Since the online open access was in May 2026, it is too early to discuss evaluation.
• There is no production schedule. This paper does not mention which company will make what and when.

The original text is accessible to everyone

This paper is published under CC BY 4.0, so anyone can read and reuse it for free. doi.org/10.1088/2752-5724/ae5120 leads directly to the PDF on the publisher's page. All citations and ranges quoted in this article are taken entirely from the abstract and paper metadata.

Where has the money already gone?

At the end of a paper, there is a section where it is written where the research funding came from, but it is usually not read by readers and just passed over. If you look up the notation in the funding items collected by Crossref, so-called funder metadata, 18 items appear, meaning that the tax of 12 countries has been invested into a single roadmap in the battery field.

From the source, Crossref funder metadata, when the same institution is split into multiple projects, they are left as separate entries, each on its own line. If the same items are extracted from OpenAlex, the two databases collect different scopes, resulting in 10 fewer entries. The Horizon Europe at the bottom of the table is a joint budget program of the European Union used for research and innovation from 2021 to 2027.

One European project could be opened to view its full details.

Out of 18 projects, the European one could be examined in detail because the European CommissionEuropean Commission
Funder · Belgium · Website publicly provides all project files under the framework program. These files include projects from Horizon 2020, the previous version of Horizon Europe, allowing a decade's worth of projects to be viewed together.

Project Number

101066486

Title

Designing molecular rotations in solid electrolytes for high-performance batteries

Period

2022-10-15 ~ 2024-10-14 (2 years)

EC Grant

187,624.32 Euro

Type

Marie Curie Individual Fellowship

This project, which provided approximately 187,000,000 won for two years to one researcher, is recorded as a single line in a roadmap paper with 30 authors. Most national research funding is of this scale. Beneath major news-worthy projects worth several hundred billion won, hundreds of such individual projects are funded.

Expanding the scope to the entire Europe, 47 projects were identified.

By downloading all Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 projects publicly released by the European Commission and searching for the term "solid electrolyte" in the titles and objectives, 47 projects were identified. The total EC funding amounts to about 120,000,000,000 won, but this only includes funds from the European Union's joint budget, not the national projects of individual member states.

Counting the start years of the 47 projects reveals when Europe began pushing into this field. For three years from 2019, there were four projects each year, but this doubled to nine in 2022 and has remained at that level since. With six projects each in 2024 and 2025, and three projects already planned for 2027, which has not yet started, it appears Europe has already allocated a budget to carry this field through at least 2029.

About six out of ten projects result in papers.

If the project number is written in the paper, a machine can link the two records without human comparison. Therefore, we randomly selected 300 EU projects and counted how many papers with those project numbers exist in OpenAlex.

This 64.7% is a lower bound. It does not mean the project produced the paper, but rather that the project number is written in the paper and OpenAlex captured it. Even if a paper was produced, if the author did not write the project number, the project would be counted as having no paper and completely excluded from this calculation.

Who is developing it

The names listed below are not selected by us but are a direct count of the names actually listed in the patent applicant registry and the author affiliations of the papers.

Among the 51 published patent applications filed in Japan, ceramic companies are included.

By retrieving the English abstracts of published patent applications from the Japanese Patent Office for the period from January to March 2026 and counting those with "solid electrolyte" in the title, there are 51 cases.

The nature of the applicant list is immediately apparent. It is not only companies that make complete vehicles and batteries that are listed, but ceramic parts companies and chemical companies are also included in the same list. Solid electrolytes ultimately involve making powder and thinly spreading it, so it means that companies with ceramic layering and ink·slurry technology are in a position to enter.

Among the 21 author institutions of the papers, only one is a company.

Among the 21 author institutions listed in this roadmap, only Applied MaterialsApplied MaterialsNASDAQ AMAT
Filings SEC · Quote Yahoo UK is a company. A semiconductor equipment company, which seems unrelated to batteries, has been listed as an author in a battery material roadmap.

The scope was further expanded to examine how the 342 papers from 32 EU projects on the same topic listed the affiliations of their authors. Papers with corporate affiliations numbered 62, or 18.1%. Companies whose names appeared multiple times included KeysightKeysightNYSE KEYS
Filings SEC · Quote Yahoo Technologies and DysonDyson
Unlisted, UmicoreUmicoreXBRU UMI
Quote Boursorama based in Belgium, Applied Materials, and Toyota.

Calendar — When will the next information be released?

In this field, no one knows when something will happen. Instead, when something is disclosed is determined by rules, so knowing these rules alone changes the way one reads the news.

One of the National Research Foundation of Korea projects leads to a center project at Seoul National University.

The research funding notation in the paper lists one National Research Foundation of Korea project. Information about what kind of project it is and how much money was allocated can be verified through the National Science and Technology Knowledge Information Service, commonly abbreviated as NTISNational Science & Technology Information Service
Data source · Website. The number RS-2023-00261543 listed in the paper does not match any full number with a hyphen, but is found only by the last eight digits without the hyphen.

The listed number refers to a ten-year center project led by Seoul National University, not Yonsei University.

The Government Investment Research Funding in the table indicates the actual amount of money the government invested in the project that year, while the portion contributed by universities or companies is separately listed under the total research funding. The Group Research Support attached to the project name refers to a large-scale project where multiple university researchers form a team to work together on a single topic for a long period, and among these, the type where a research center is established at a university is called the Leading Research Center type. The items listed in the table are directly copied from those selected by NTIS for external disclosure on its website.

The author who wrote this number in the paper is affiliated with Yonsei UniversityYonsei University
University · South Korea · Website, but the project indicated by the number is not a Yonsei University project; it is a center project led by Seoul National University. Since multiple university researchers participate as a team in the Leading Research Center, it is natural for a Yonsei University-affiliated author to write the number of a Seoul National University project.

However, the NTIS does not publicly disclose who participated in which center, so the participation relationships themselves cannot be confirmed with this data. The total government-funded research budget for the four years combined is 17,500,000,000 won, and the project period still extends until February 2033. A center of that scale stood behind the line of numbers at the end of the paper.

The national project on solid-state batteries includes 847 projects, with 735,800,000,000 won in government funding.

When counting national projects using solid-state batteries without fuel cell mixtures as a keyword, the scale becomes immediately apparent. The total government funding accumulated since 2010 exceeds 700,000,000,000 won. Over 300 projects are currently underway in 2026 alone.

When viewed year by year, it becomes clear in which years the amount of money and the number of projects increased significantly. Government investment research funding increased every year without exception, growing nearly ninefold from 2019 to 2026. The number of newly initiated projects doubled in 2020 and then increased by about 100 each year, reaching 130 in 2026.

Looking at the ministries that provided funding, the Ministry of Science and ICT had the most, followed by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of SMEs and StartupsMinistry of SMEs and Startups
Ministry · Website, and then the Ministry of Industry. By stage, basic research accounted for nearly half, with the rest filled by development and application, indicating that the focus is still on uncovering principles in laboratories.

Government funds are concentrated in national research institutions, while companies are dominated by equipment firms.

By linking the money to the names of the institutions conducting the projects, you can see which institutions received the funds. The top institutions are government-funded research institutes that are established and operated with government budgets, while universities and companies follow below.

The cumulative government investment research funds are the sum of annual amounts grouped by performing institution name, and the number of projects is counted by institutional project number. Institutions with dual naming (Korea Electronics Technology Institute → Korea Electronics Technology Institute, Korea Electrotechnology Research InstituteKorea Electrotechnology Research Institute
Research institute · South Korea · Website, Daejoo Electronic MaterialsDaejoo Electronic MaterialsKOSDAQ 078600
Filings DART · Quote finance.naver.com with three names) were combined. Since the search includes research content, projects partially related to solid-state batteries are included — for example, the Korea Electronics Technology Institute's ultra-fast charging project. For the same reason, the 7,600,000,000 project by Fosun (autonomous drone development) was excluded from the table as it is not a solid-state battery project.

Names from the corporate side stand out. At the top are CIES and PNT, which are not battery manufacturers but manufacturers of battery production equipment. CIES changed its name to SFA NexelSFA Nexel (formerly 씨아이에스)KOSDAQ 222080
Filings DART · Quote finance.naver.com in June 2026, but the old name remains in the NTIS database. Equipment manufacturer Ilshin Autoclave is also listed above. Below them, material and chemical companies such as Daeju Electronic Materials, Dongsuh Electrolight, and Solibis follow, a pattern similar to the Japanese published patent list where ceramic component companies and chemical companies appear in the same positions.

The largest single project is the "Development of a Convergence Platform for Ultra-Gap Secondary Batteries to Secure Next-Generation Secondary Battery Technology" undertaken by the Korea Research Institute of Chemical TechnologyKorea Research Institute of Chemical Technology
Research institute · South Korea · Website. The funding for this project is allocated from the major budget of the research institute, not from a government competitive grant program.

What can be compared with Europe is not the amount but the timing of the increase.

Then, which of Europe or Korea uses more funding? This article does not answer that question because the European figure includes only the European Union's joint budget, while the Korean figure covers the entire national R&D across ministries, and thus the time periods and search ranges differ.

What is comparable is not the amount of money spent, but the timing when the number of projects increased. In Europe, new projects doubled from four to nine in 2022, while in South Korea, they doubled from 33 to 69 two years earlier, in 2020. Both sides clearly had a distinct starting point when they began to intensify efforts in this field.

If the search term is expanded to solid electrolyte, the cumulative total rises to 1,374,900,000,000 KRW, but this includes projects on solid oxide fuel cells, so it is referenced only as a note.

So, what should be observed?

What this article leaves behind is not a conclusion but three points to verify.

1. Where does the news fall in the roadmap? When a solid-state battery article appears, it is examined whether it solves one of the five issues: ionic conductivity, stability, manufacturing, process, or cost. Solving one means the other four remain unchanged.
2. Did the company announce it or secure rights? An announcement is just words, while a patent application is an action that requires money and time. Anyone can count whether actual patent applications are being accumulated by checking the published gazettes.
3. Look beyond 18 months. Today's patents reflect decisions made 1.5 years ago. By checking whether current announcements align with or contradict those decisions, one can infer whether the company has changed direction.

What this roadmap does not answer is which of the five obstacles will be resolved first. The authors only outlined the direction for the next ten years, without specifying which issue should be resolved first. The next verification will be whether the three projects scheduled to start in 2027 in Europe actually begin, and what outcomes are registered from the 130 new projects initiated in South Korea in 2026. The same method is applied to other topics to sequentially connect where money was first moved, where papers were published, where rights were secured, and where companies made announcements.