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Batteries "will be obsolete" for mobile devices - capXX

A new source of portable electricity - a "supercapacitor" - may replace the battery in a lot of mobile data applications, according to an Australian startup company, capXX, which expects to be a global leader in supercapacitor technology.

Energy storage devices, says capXX founder Anthony Kongats, "may be broadly characterised by their energy density (energy stored per unit volume or mass) and by their power (how fast that energy can be delivered from the device)."

At one end of the scale, conventional capacitors have enormous power - they can deliver a huge jolt - but store only tiny amounts of energy. "At the other end, batteries can store lots of energy but take a long time to be charged up or discharge. That is they have low power. Relative to these established technologies, supercapacitors offer a unique combination of high power and high energy performance parameters with commercial relevance," he writes in his Web site.

The technology is ideal for portable devices, says Kongats, where "we can offer benefits to any application or product requiring high power through fast time constants" - but although he indicates that notebook computers might be an example where this would be useful, he doesn't elaborate.

The major distinguishing technological feature of the cap-XX technology "is the ability to tailor the supercapacitors to achieve a wide and continuous range of time constants . No competitor is known to have achieved this," Kongats concludes.

The technology was discovered at the recent Intel technical seminars in San Francisco by Rupert Goodwins