Electrochemical CO2 reduction is an attractive option for storing renewable electricity and for the sustainable production of valuable chemicals and fuels. In this roadmap, we review recent progress in fundamental understanding, catalyst development, and in engineering and scale-up. We discuss the outstanding challenges towards commercialization of electrochemical CO2 reduction technology: energy efficiencies, selectivities, low current densities, and stability. We highlight the opportunities in establishing rigorous standards for benchmarking performance, advances in in operando characterization, the discovery of new materials towards high value products, the investigation of phenomena across multiple-length scales and the application of data science towards doing so. We hope that this collective perspective sparks new research activities that ultimately bring us a step closer towards establishing a low- or zero-emission carbon cycle.

We report on integrating ultrathin monolithic nanoporous gold (npAu) catalyst coatings for CO 2 reduction in a large electrode area (25 cm 2) electrochemical membrane reactor with gas diffusion electrodes at 100 mA/cm 2. The CO Faraday efficiency increases with increasing thickness, from 65% to 75% and 80% for 1, 5, and 10 layers of npAu leaves where each npAu leaf layer is 100 nm thick. For the one npAu leaf layer configuration, this corresponds to an extremely high CO current density of 955 A/g gold thus demonstrating the potential for commercial applications. IMPACT STATEMENT By device level optimization of catalyst integration we significantly improved the utilization of gold catalysts for electrochemical CO 2 reduction to syngas at industrial relevant current densities of 100 mA/cm 2 .

Electrochemical CO 2 reduction (ECR) promises the replacement of fossil fuels as the source of feedstock chemicals and seasonal storage of renewable energy. While much progress has been made in catalyst development and electrochemical reactor design, few studies have addressed the effect of catalyst integration on device performance. Using a microfluidic gas diffusion electrolyzer, we systematically studied the effect of thickness and the morphology of electron beam (EB) and magnetron-sputtered (MS) Cu catalyst coatings on ECR performance. We observed that EB-Cu outperforms MS-Cu in current density, selectivity, and energy efficiency, with 400 nm thick catalyst coatings performing the best. The superior performance of EB-Cu catalysts is assigned to their faceted surface morphology and sharper Cu/gas diffusion layer interface, which increases their hydrophobicity. Tests in a large-scale zero-gap electrolyzer yielded similar product selectivity distributions with an ethylene Faradaic efficiency of 39% at 200 mA/cm 2 , demonstrating the scalability for industrial ECR applications.

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Inorganic interposers made of glass are attractive for advanced high frequency applications and ultra- fine line patterning technology. Because glass combines a couple of benefits like large form factor, good coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) matching to silicon, smooth surface and a low dielectric constant and loss tangent. Recently much progress has been made with respect to glass electrical and physical properties. This allows for handling of thin glass sheets down to 100 μm in a typical PCB panel format. Also advances have been made in the area of laser drilling allowing aspect ratio up to 1:10 for 25 μm diameter of through glass via (TGV). Another major challenge is the cost competitive and reliable metallization of smooth glass, a critical prerequisite for the use of glass substrates in the electronic packaging market. Plated copper does not adhere directly to glass. Sputtering technology typically also requires a 50 nm thick adhesion promoting metal layer (like Ti) before copper can be seeded. This metal layer could not be etched together with the copper and needs to be removed between traces by etching in an additional step. A volatile flammable solvent based metal oxide precursor coating solution has been used to make an adhesive metal oxide layer by a modified sol-gel process. To prevent potential safety issue for mass production water based metal oxide precursor coating solution so called VitroCoat GI W has been developed. The VitroCoat GI W solution can be dip-coated on flat glass surface and TGVs followed by sintering to form an ultrathin metal oxide adhesion layer (about 10nm). The thin adhesive layer enables electroless and electrolytic copper plating directly onto glass substrates without changing any of the glass properties or impacting high frequency performance. The thin metal oxide adhesive layer is non-conductive and can be easily removed from the area between circuit traces. This paper will focus on the coating uniformity and capability of VitroCoat GI W on flat glass surface and TGVs and the adhesion of wet chemical metallization on glass interposer. This adhesion layer can be used for copper fine line patterning on glass and radio frequency (RF) device fabrication.