Summary: If
you've ever had just five minutes to charge your smartphone's flat battery and
wished it didn't take an hour, help is at hand. An Israeli company is working
on a nano-material that could see your mobile fully charged in just seconds.
By Niv Lilien for Tel Aviv Tech
In offices in a dusty street near the Diamond
Exchange building in Ramat Gan, something interesting is afoot: a company
called StoreDot is working on battery technology that many mobile users will
have been longing for for some time.
The basis of StoreDot's
work was discovered during a University of Tel Aviv research project into
Alzheimer's disease. The researchers found that a certain peptide molecule that
'shortens' neurons in the brain causing Alzheimer's was also seeming to show
high capacitance, thanks to an ability called 'charge trapping' —
where electrons are effectively held in place.
According to Professor Gil Rosenman, who
worked on the project and is now StoreDot's chief scientist, two of these
molecules can be used to create a viable crystal only two nanometers long.
These crystals form the NanoDots at the heart of Storedot's technology.
Artificially synthesised from the same
building blocks — elements such as oxygen and hydrogen — as natural
peptides, these NanoDots could prove disruptive to multi-billion-dollar
industries such as batteries, displays, image sensors, and non-volatile memory.
Doron Myersdorf, former head of SanDisk's SSD
division and now StoreDot's CEO, says that the company has decided to focus on
NanoDots' uses in smartphone related technologies, including faster memory;
more sensitive camera sensors ultrafast-charging batteries; and flexible,
energy-efficient displays.
Founded in 2012, StoreDot is now chiefly
concentrating on the last two areas. Demoing this week at Microsoft's ThinkNext
event in Tel Aviv, StoreDot showed a prototype of a battery using
NanoDots — powering a standard Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone — that charged
from flat to full in under a minute.
How does it work? The NanoDots cover the tiny
'cavities' that cover an electrode found in a standard battery, extending its
reactive surface, and allowing its capacity to be increased tenfold.
Through the addition of the NanoDots, the electrode becomes
"multi-function" — at one end, the electrode stores electrical energy
creating a capacitor, and at the other, lets it flow into the battery's
lithium.
In layman's terms, StoreDot has created a
'buffer' that stores electrical current coming from the wall socket over a
period of around thirty seconds, then letting it flow slowly into the lithium.
Myersdorf says that eventually, the company plans to get rid of the lithium in
the battery altogether.
Changing the chemical reactions occurring
inside the battery should also improve battery life in long run — allowing
thousands of charge cycles instead of hundreds today — while still keeping
the same weight and form factor.
The NanoDots have other intriguing qualities
too. When embedded into polymer and everyday screens, they can replace the
toxic materials like cadmium used in modern displays. They can also be
manufactured in different colours, using a special version of basic colours to
create a full, rich colour matrix.
StoreDot's team, at the behest of
manufacturers, is using blue backlighting instead of white, and the NanoDots
can be used in both LCD an bio-LED screens — or, in Myersdorf's words:
"We can do displays for both Samsung and Apple", a reference to the
different display technologies each company is using today (Apple with LCD,
Samsung with organic LED).
StoreDot already has prototype displays in its
lab, and showed me this week how it's lighting a standard iPhone display.
There's not a full colour range yet — only 70 percent — but the company is
working towards more than a full NTSC colour gamut. StoreDot future displays
are equally free of toxic materials and, as a bonus, they're flexible too.
The NanoDots also have applications in the
pharmaceutical industry as drug delivery agent and could one day replace metals
such a gold or silver currently needed to penetrate cell membranes and deliver
the active ingredient.
With several patents filed and several more
pending, as well as a big smartphone company onboard as an investor, Myersdorf
intends to have his company's products ready for marketing in 2015 and on sale
in 2016. But don't rejoice too much just yet: StoreDot's new batteries will
cost twice as much as the regular ones.