Find it difficult to make it to the end of the day with a full battery on your smartphone? Well, the solution might be on the way sooner than you think with engineers in Tel-Aviv showing off a device that can charge a smartphone battery in just 30 seconds.
The prototype battery is currently the size of a cigarette packet and requires a special power source, but its creators – two-year-old Israeli start-up StoreDot – say that they’ll be able fit the technology into a regular smartphone in a year’s time and plan on producing a commercial device in three years.
The key to the battery’s incredibly quick charging time is the use of self-assembling nano-crystals made from peptides; a type of amino acid thats used in various biological processes in the body.
These tiny, conductive structures (spheres just 2.1 nanometers across) have unique properties that make them useful to electronic engineers. They’ve previously been used to develop memory chips that can write data three times faster than traditional devices.