A battery that can charge in under 30 seconds has been shown off at a technology conference in Tel Aviv. Israeli start-up StoreDot displayed the device - made of biological structures - at Microsoft's Think Next Conference.
A Samsung S4 smartphone went from a dead battery to full power in 26 seconds in the demonstration.
The battery is currently only a prototype and the firm predicts it will take three years to become a commercially viable product.
In the demonstration, a battery pack the size of a cigarette packet was attached to a smartphone. "We think we can integrate a battery into a smartphone within a year and have a commercially ready device in three years," founder Dr Dorn Myersdorf told the BBC.
The bio-organic battery utilises tiny self-assembling nano-crystals that were first identified in research being done into Alzheimer's disease at Tel Aviv University 10 years ago.
The nano-dots are described by StoreDot as "stable, robust spheres" that are 2.1 nanometers in diameter and made up of peptide molecules.
The technology has a range of uses, founder Dr Myersdorf said. "Batteries are just one of the industries we can disrupt with this new material. It is new physics, new chemistry, a new approach to devices," he said.
The team has also used the nano-crystals in memory chips which could write three times faster than traditional flash memory and as a non-toxic alternative to cadmium in screens.
Dr Myersdorf said that the batteries are likely to be 30 to 40% more expensive to manufacture compared to traditional ones and the final product will be twice as expensive than those on the market today. But making them should be a relatively easy process. "It is about letting nature take its course.
We just need a facility that can do chemical processing," he said.
Source: BBC
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