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

"ten times less power"?

[oldenuf2knowbetter]

Would "ten times less power" be anything like "one tenth as much power"?

Re:Not(?) A Big Deal

[green1]

the problem is, even in "standby" the phone does a lot of transmitting, and that transmitting is still a power hog.

I'm not quite as negative as the grandparent poster, in that I'm happy if any component uses less power (every bit helps) but in reality, it's the transmitter that uses the lions share of the juice, not the reciever (even in standby).

Re:Why are we still using batteries?

[m85476585]

If you have a 2-way radio (I don't know if a cellphone would work), go to Radioshack and get a low-current light bulb (not LED) and connect solid leads about 8" long to each lead of the bulb. Make them both into a coil, slip one over the 2-way radio antenna, and transmit. The lightbulb should glow bright. Unfortnately RF energy decreases as inverse square.

One idea

[thePig]

The transmitter would be the one which would be using the max power in any cellphone.
In that case, make the antenna directional.
But then, we do *not* know the direction to which I have to sent the signal.
That can be done by maybe -
1. Changes needed for Towers
      Sent downstream a small pilot signal of the same freq as the upstream signal which the phone emits for that call.
2. Changes needed in the Cell
      Have a direction sensor in your mobile for this pilot signal. Once direction the highest amp for the pilot signal is obtained, sent the signal back in the same direction.

Instead of the wasted signal going all around, we have a signal which has very good directional properties. Thus the power of the signal to be sent can be reduced to maybe even 1/10th or 1/100th.
Thus the battery life also will have a propotional increase.

Adv of this system -
1.We dont care how many changes in direction the signal took and all.. Since the pilot came this way, my signal (almost the same freq, so almost the same refractive/reflective properties)will reach the tower proper.
2. Worries about your head getting fried by signal now over. Supposing that your head occupies 90 degrees of the phone directionality, now there is 1/4th time the power goes through you. In anycase, I dont think there is a high probability of the max amp pilot signal coming through your head.. So much less say1/10th of the time upstream signal goes through you.

Prob -
Changes needed in all towers.
Is a antenna which can change direction depending on a signal already there ? If not the idea wont work at all.

Just an idea.

Re:One idea

[planetmn]

Is a antenna which can change direction depending on a signal already there ? If not the idea wont work at all.

A combination of multiple "antennas" with a 120degree coverage (for three) rather than a single antenna with 360 coverage, and phased array (look at phased array radars) could make this possible. Power savings though, might not happen because of the processing required.

-dave

Re:Thats interesting and all

[ltbarcly]

The red cones in your eye react more slowly than the other color receptors. Therefore when you are looking at the red led, which is a pure red light surrounded by darkness (not common in nature btw) what you are actually seeing is the vibration due to the crunch momentarily after they happen. Your brain adjusts so that you do not notice the vibration in your vision, except it cannot take into account the slight delay in the red cones. Therefore the red light appears to jump around.

Re:Why are we still using batteries?

[darthwader]

A while ago, Mythbusters did a "free energy" show. They collected a bunch of plans from "the Internet", built the devices, and tested them.

One of the devices that surprised me was a 50' long aerial, attached to some simple circuitry. The aerial absorbed RF energy, and the electronics converted it into a somewhat useful DC power supply. I think it was producing somewhere around 1 volt, no idea how much current, indoors. IIRC, they said it was "almost as good as a AA battery".

So, not only is is possible in theory, it's possible in practice. But it's still wildly impractical.

I think it's episode 24 (http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/epi sode/episode_06.html).