Xiaomi just announced that at least one of its 2020 phones will have battery charging technology capable of fully loading a 4,000mAh battery in 17 minutes. That’s basically five times faster than the fastest charging iPhone 11 and double the speed of the previous record holder outside of China, the Realme X2 Pro.

The company announced the deployment of this technology — called Super Charge Turbo — at its developers conference, as reported today by Soyancincau.com.

The Oppo Reno Ace has 65W fast charging, but it’s not available outside of Asia. We know some technical details about how Xiaomi’s technology works but there was no specific comment about how this superfast charging will affect the battery life and charging capability over time.

With standard lithium ion battery technology, the amount of heat generated would be way too high at 100W — significantly damaging and shortening the life of the battery, even with potential catastrophic consequences.

Technology to stop the overheating

Xiaomi claims it has solved these issues using something called a MTW battery structure, which apparently greatly reduces temperatures and internal resistance.

According to TDK, MTW technology stacks multiple tabs on the winded cathode and anode sheets inside the battery pack. The more tabs, it says, the less resistance and the less heat, because the heat doesn’t concentrate in a few points but distributes across many: “having more tabs results in lesser resistance and minimized exothermic heat.” TDK says that winding sheets so they precisely align inside a battery is a significant challenge, but apparently it can be good enough for 100W to charge.

The company described that the battery will “feature a high-voltage charge pump“ and a double-cell battery architecture. The battery has nine layers of protection for security, Xiaomi says, with seven layers on the phone’s board and two around the battery.

However, Xiaomi didn’t make any mention of how many cycles we should expect from these batteries or what will be the overall battery life. There was no mention of the graphene battery technology that has been seeing some experimentation in labs.

Still, 100W charging on a commercial phone is quite a feat. Xiaomi keeps putting out some really impressive technology in its devices. A few month ago we saw the Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha, a phone with an impressive wraparound OLED display which apparently is already reaching consumers in China. And just two weeks ago the Xiaomi Mi CC9 Pro debuted with the first 108MP photography sensor, a large chip made by Samsung — long before the expected launch of the Galaxy S11 in February 2020.