Interesting company. I did a search and found some more interesting reading for the socially challenged on this Saturday afternoon such as myself today.

Patent - http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=2&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&p=1&p=1&S1=(Amprius+AND+graphite)&OS=Amprius+AND+graphite&RS=(Amprius+AND+graphite)

Paper-http://www.stanford.edu/group/cui_group/papers/High%20Performance%20Lithium%20Battery%20Anodes%20Using%20Silicon%20Nanowires.pdf

Probably worth noteing that LiIon batteries with graphite electrodes are over 40 years old. Commercialization takes a long time and Amprius (the company making these Silcone based batteries) is a startup, abiet a well financed one with some A level board members. Further more it seems the biggest limitation to these type of bateries is that they swell up to 400% when charged, which destroys the battery. In this case the inventors used a conductive substrait with holes in it (25% is open space) and could even be made of graphite or graphene. So to over come this the inventors coated this conductive swiss cheese type material and it only is 30% better than a LiIon battery. Clearly they have not optimized this yet as they postulate it could be orders of magnitude better thoretically.

Potential issues : 1) Cost, are they more expensive to make; 2) Market penetration would be an issue unless cost or performance were much better, 30% does not seem that big a difference; 3) Will increasing the capacity hit a limit due to swelling of the Silicone layer, maybe, that is why they are only working on incremental improvements; 4) lastly Amprius says itself that moble phone makers may not want a much better battey since they want customers to change their product in as short a life cycle as possible.

This is a relatively new technology discovered about 7 or 8 years ago so maybe in 20 or 30 years it will be a major market factor, but I think it has a long way to go and it may still use graphite or graphene. LiIon batteries are the dominant product likely for the foreseeable future, so I would not get rid of my graphite stocks especially my ZEN just yet.

Thanks for the reference Hop