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: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?

[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).