Dynamic Switching and Energy Storage Unified by Electrochemical Ion Intercalation

Abstract Ion‐intercalation compounds with transport pathways for guest ions find their prevalent applications in energy storage devices. Along with the ion intercalation, chemical transformations of the host material are involved, resulting in the change of the electronic structure. Electronic conductance, therefore, depends on the number of ions intercalated into the host material, leading to the development of new switching devices that use different electronic conductance states to store and process information. Although energy storage and dynamic switching devices are often regarded as completely different, the unified working mechanism based on ion intercalation opens up the possibility of integrating both devices and using them in a coordinated way. In this perspective, the materials and device designs of dynamic switching devices based on ion intercalation are briefly introduced and an unexplored avenue to project dynamic switching behaviors to the operation status of batteries with synergistic time and length scales is proposed.