New Chip Promises Longer Battery Life

Roland Piquepaille writes "It always happens when you need it the most: the battery of your cellphone just died. But now, researchers of the University of Rochester have developed a wireless chip that needs ten times less power than current designs. The new chip relies on a technology named injection locked frequency divider (ILFD) which dramatically reduces the time needed to check for transmission frequencies which are performed several billion times per second by your current phone. The new chip uses five transistors and can perform divisions by 3 instead of only 2 by previous circuits, allowing a perfect communication between two phones communicating at 2.0001 and 2.0002 gigahertz respectively."

Comments

Re:"ten times less power"?

[Paradise Pete]

Stick a "be" in there for me, would ya? Anyway, as long as I'm following up on my own post, I'l try to restate it in a less pompous way. What would "two times less" mean? It certainly shouldn't mean half as much, but it would have to in order to be able to state one tenth as "ten times less." So the original comparison form is simply broken.

Re:Battery power

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"It really doesn't matter how much power the phone uses... the fact is that it still uses power. Consuming power from a limited source means that it will reach a point when the battery is depleted, except now it just takes 10 days longer than before."

You're absolutely right. I don't even know WHY they're bothering! *places hands on his and sadly shakes his head*

Re:Why are we still using batteries?

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

IANAPhysicist, but to put it another way, if you take an omnidirectional antenna, and draw a sphere around it, the total energy over that sphere will be the same, regardless of the distance. However, the energy density (e.g. energy per square foot) decreases drastically as distance increases. Since the receiving antenna has a fixed size, the amount of energy captured by your antenna decreases equally drastically.

As you said, it's pure geometry.

Re:This is all incorrect. PR & media idiocy as

[hankwang]

Slashdot's editorial quality has degraded in the last few years so much that I am thinking about deleting it from my bookmarks.

Calm down... Most people come to slashdot for the comments. The articles themselves only serve as a starting point for a discussion, which is often valuable since there are always people like you who really know what they're talking about.