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The future may not need batteries, and devices can be charged in a matter of minutes and stay that way for weeks thanks to silicon power cells.

A team of engineers at Vanderbilt built a silicon supercapacitor that can be built into silicon chips and do away with batteries. The device stores electricity by assembling ions on the surface of a porous silicon surface.

Silicon reacts with some of the chemicals in the electrolytes that provide the ions and the engineers coated it with graphene. It will do the job of protecting the silicon and improving the device's energy density by two orders of magnitude, which makes it capable of storing more energy than big bulky commercial capacitors currently used in technology like regenerative braking systems.

"If you ask experts about making a supercapacitor out of silicon, they will tell you it is a crazy idea," Cary Pint, the assistant professor who led the project, told Vanderbilt's news service. "But we’ve found an easy way to do it." And they didn't just do it to make a fancy device. Pint hopes to use it as "a road map for integrated energy storage." In other words, he wants to see devices that store electricity right in their silicon chips. "The more that we can integrate power storage into existing materials and devices, the more compact and efficient they will become," he said.

Is this future close? Lets hope so. [Vanderbilt via Discovery]