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Breakthrough Promises Smartphones that Use Half the Power

Posted by samzenpus on from the save-the-juice dept.

Dupple writes in with news about a discovery that should extend the life of your battery in the near future. "Powering cellular base stations around the world will cost $36 billion this year—chewing through nearly 1 percent of all global electricity production. Much of this is wasted by a grossly inefficient piece of hardware: the power amplifier, a gadget that turns electricity into radio signals. The versions of amplifiers within smartphones suffer similar problems. If you've noticed your phone getting warm and rapidly draining the battery when streaming video or sending large files, blame the power amplifiers. As with the versions in base stations, these chips waste more than 65 percent of their energy—and that's why you sometimes need to charge your phone twice a day. It's currently a lab-bench technology, but if it proves itself in commercialization, which is expected to start in 2013—first targeting LTE base stations—the technology could slash base station energy use by half. Likewise, a chip-scale version of the technology, still in development, could double the battery life of smartphones."

6 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not another one... by Scytheford · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Too bad the article has nothing to do with battery technology, and you look a fool.

  2. What technology? Who built it? by complete+loony · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you're just going to pick a few sentences out of the article, you should at least talk about "who" and "what". All we've been left with in the summary is "problem description" and "hype"

    --
    09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
  3. I dont blame power amplifiers by aXis100 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Pretty sure most of the power used is not in the radio - before "smartphones" we had phones with similar battery capacities achieving much longer standby times AND talktimes. Even if you turn off a smartphone's Mobile data and stick to Wifi (with only 30mW transmit required), battery life still isn't great.

    I think it's got a lot lot more to do with:
    - Big, bright displays
    - Multicore, gigahertz CPU's regularly kept busy with background apps
    - Far more sensors embedded in the unit to power - GPS, accelerometers, etc.

    1. Re:I dont blame power amplifiers by icebrain · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think it's got a lot lot more to do with:
      - Big, bright displays
      - Multicore, gigahertz CPU's regularly kept busy with background apps
      - Far more sensors embedded in the unit to power - GPS, accelerometers, etc.

      Plus, the whole obsession with "the phone must be THIN!!!1!"
      If the manufacturers quit worrying about trying to fit the phone into the form factor of an index card, there would be enough thickness for a reasonable battery.

      --
      The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
  4. Class C by GrahamCox · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Class C RF power amplifiers can be ~90% efficient, because they drive a tuned load. That's been known for most of the 20th century. Is the problem that these need to be wideband amps? Perhaps there is a clever way to reconcile those needs, though I'm not seeing it.

  5. A Gadget? by jamesl · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... the power amplifier, a gadget that turns electricity into radio signals.

    Any article that calls an important piece of technology a "gadget" is neither serious nor credible.