Charge Phones In 30 Seconds: One Startup's Plan

An Israeli startup, spun out of Tel Aviv University on the strength of technology originally developed to fight Alzheimer's Disease, claims to be able to fully charge a cellphone in 30 seconds using semiconductors made from short-chain amino acids.

StoreDot demonstrated its prototype, which is the size of a laptop charger, at Microsoft's Think Next technology conference in Tel Aviv April 4 and announced $6 million in venture capital its CEO said would help the company bring a half-size version to market by 2016.

The charger is built using semiconductors made from an organic polymer rather than inorganic silicon-based polymers. The announcement comes at a time when the field of different wireless charging standards seems to be narrowing.

The material is based on artificially created peptides -- amino acids that link end-to-end in a chain that doesn't extend far enough to allow the amino acid to qualify to be a protein.

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