From Dead Battery To Full-Charge In 26 Seconds For Galaxy S4?

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The Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) Think Next event held annually in Tel Aviv bills itself as a “festival of ingenuity.” It is, bar none, THE show each year for the Israeli high tech industry to take center stage to showcase its innovations, and have its minds collectively blown by surprise guests, thoughtful speakers, and ground breaking demonstrations.

This week saw StoreDot Ltd., a Tel-Aviv based start-up, demonstrate a prototype charger that can fully charge a battery in under thirty seconds by utilizing tiny-assembling nano-crystals, or as StoreDot calls them “stable, robust spheres”, that measure 2.1 nanometers in diameter and are made from peptide molecules. StoreDot was born out of the nanotechnology department at Tel Aviv University and developed its prototype charger for Samsung’s Galaxy S4 in the demonstration.

So how does it work?

“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,” said StoreDot founder Dr. Myersdorf.

Beyond the fact that peptides are small chains of amino acids, and amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, I’m ill-equipped to explain how peptides speed the charging of phones, but the company has come to my aid with a video….. that is absolutely without explanation either. The video does, however, show a Galaxy 4 receiving a full charge in no time flat. The company has also used the technology to develop chips that write three times as fast as standard flash memory and as a non-toxic alternative to cadmium in computer, tablet, and smartphone screens.

A battery that can charge in under 30 seconds has been shown off at a technology conference in Tel Aviv. A Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (LON:BC94) (KRX:005930) 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.

Could see commercial applications within 3 years

“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 2.1 nanometers in diameter and made up of peptide molecules.

The team has also used the nano-crystals in memory chips which could write three times faster than traditional chips.
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.

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