Australian technology firm, cap-XX, may give the global mobile electronics industry the charge it needs to enable next generation portable computing and wireless devices. Perched on the northern edge of Sydney's silicon strip at Lane Cove, the company has designed a portable power source that will let you operate your mobile phone, laptop or PDA for longer than a conventional battery but charge it in a matter of seconds.

Currently mobile power storage solutions are overwhelmingly dominated by battery technology. cap-xx's solution emerged from supercapacitor research originating at the CSIRO and continued by the company as a commercial project since it received R&D grants from the Federal and New South Wales Governments in 1997.

cap-XX CEO Anthony Kongats says that supercapacitor technology brings conventional batteries and capacitors onto common ground. "Supercapacitors bridge the gap between as capacitors and traditional batteries," he said. "Batteries can store lots of energy but they're low on power -- capacitors can't store much energy but, whatever they can store, they release very quickly." The new supercapacitors will be able to do both.

Conventional batteries store energy electro-chemically when a power source is applied to them. When the battery is called upon for use the chemical reaction is reversed releasing that energy. In either direction the process is a slow one, meaning that it doesn't release or store power quickly over time. That voltage needs to reach an acceptable level before it can run a device - without confusing things, that is achieved through a conventional capacitor.

In contrast, conventional capacitors store and release energy rapidly through a physical process that involves charging the surface of a substance with electrons (think of children scuffing their shoes on carpet and then gleefully looking for a victim to zap). The main impediment to using this system is finding a material that can store a useful amount of energy in a feasibly small space for use in portable electronic devices.

For obvious reasons, Kongats was unable to divulge too much about the company's solution to the problem, but suffice to say it has a Tardis-like miracle to it. Using carbon materials the combined research and development effort behind cap-XX has managed to store sufficient chargeable surface area half-a-kilometre square into a volume 30mm by 15mm by 15mm. To put that statistic in perspective, a Lithium-Ion battery is roughly 50mm x 30mm x 10mm.

The company claims that the benefits of cap-XX supercapacitors go beyond questions of size and charging times. Kongats claims that their ancillary improvements hack at design barriers that restrict the functionality and cost of existing portable devices. Supercapacitors deliver power without side effects that hamper batteries such as voltage ripple. This means that devices to be built with greater numbers of smaller low cost components which should translate into to broader features sets at lower costs.

Supercapacitors could help address another weighty issues for manufacturers, as global governing bodies ponder the tech-bonanza's impact on the environment. Conventional re-chargeable batteries used in mobile phones and laptops contain toxic heavy metals, considered to be one of the highest contributors to soil and water pollution. Kongats claims that the material used in cap-XX supercapacitors is safer than that used in conventional batteries, but for him lower-toxicity is only a component of the ecological benefit. "They [the supercapacitors] can endure millions of charge cycles," he said, suggesting that they present a much lower burden in terms of waste disposal over the long-term.

With recent statistics calculating mobile phone penetration rates at 60 percent in developed countries and the growing popularity of PDAs, it is not hard to understand the potential value of the company's products. Last year the company announced that it received AU$10M worth of financing from an investor group comprised of three companies including Intel Capital. Intel, known for strategic investments and partnerships, seems to be taking a holistic view of cap-XX' value.

"Internet-enabled devices that are highly portable will accelerate the growth of the Internet economy and fuel the demand for computing" said Intel Australia's David Bolt, in a statement supporting the announcement. Intel is also backing cap-XX by sharing its marketing and development expertise.

The other two members of the group are Technology Venture Partners and Innovation Capital. Innovation Capital is VC firm with concurrent operations in the US and Australia; Technology Venture Partners exclusively focuses on capital needs of Australian technology companies.

cap-XX is confident of its chances of succeeding. In a recent press communique, Kongats said "The cap-XX products are widely recognised as technically superior to those of competing companies, and are protected by US, Japanese and European patents". Most of cap-XX customers are based in the US and Asia, and Kongats expects the company to dominate the global market for supercapacitors, which is forecast to exceed US$6 billion dollars by the year 2005.

The company has already established a manufacturing plant at its Sydney base of operation and accepted a contract to supply cap-XX products to an overseas manufacturer for application in a wireless PDA device. The company to will start shipping products in commercial quantities by July 2001.

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