Slashdot Mirror
Breakthrough Promises Smartphones that Use Half the Power
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."
Why do I not believe that 1% of global electrical production goes to powering wireless base stations.
What's going to happen is, about ten seconds after this technology is deployed, the cell phone companies will halve the number of cell towers using the argument that the new tech makes them unnecessary. Your battery is again drained as weaker signals mean more amplification is necessary.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Too bad the article has nothing to do with battery technology, and you look a fool.
The word "battery" never appears in the headline, so maybe you didn't read that either.
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.
But what will keep me warm on those long lonely nights while I watching inappropriate things on my phone?
IBM Watson group announce Watson has solved Smartphone battery problems! Using the magic of connected-world technology, Watson now developed batteries that think-smarter.
Soon Watson will be moved to self-driving cars, where it will be given the far more difficult task of following a white line around an empty track at superfast speeds! The connected technology painted stripe we leverage allows our world beating Watson to go around faster* than the competitors!
* You may not benchmark it and no stopwatches will be allowed into the demonstration.
"Breakthrough Promises Smartphones Radio Chip that Use Half the Power"
Last time I checked, smartphones still have a cpu, screen, memory, etc... It would still add to longer lasting batteries, just not the whole system.
Tomorrow is another day...
Okay, that's your choice. But what does that have to do with this article?
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
This improves the standby and talk time, and may be network power consumption. Most of the other stuff the apps use - like CPU, GPU, sensors will not be any different because of this. So to claim double of battery life is exaggeration. It may double the standby time and probably improve the talk time by a considerable percentage.
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
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.
You must be new on planet news: could save up to 50% means "will probably save less than 5%, but we need a grant".
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Breakthrough Promises Smartphones that Use Half the Power
Seems inefficient, wouldn't it be better if they used all the power?
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
Its about time we use our phone battery power for productive work instead of wasting it in a grossly inefficient piece of hardware: the power amplifier.
Some of us learn from other people's mistakes and the rest of us have to be other people. -- Zig Ziglar
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.
No, they promise a radio chip that uses less than half the power, which is why it could cut down on the overall consumption by 50%. It's perfectly possible, as long as the chip currently uses a big enough percentage of the total energy consumption.
Dilbert RSS feed
Does the screen really use more than 1/2? Or is that only when the phone is being used?
During about 90% of the day, my phone is in idle, with the screen turned off but still pinging the network.
Dilbert RSS feed
Besides which batteries have been steadily growing in capacity year on year for decades, which is why we have smaller batteries doing much more intensive work in phones today. On that note, I predict not longer life for phones from this technology, but smaller batteries yet.
...is here: http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/62479/712059703.pdf?sequence=1
Any article that calls an important piece of technology a "gadget" is neither serious nor credible.
The measure that matters is "energy per coded bit". In that regard, Class C amplifiers suck because they can only send one bit at a time. With clever coding (eg. QAM), linear amplifiers can send many bits at once.
Linear amplifiers waste as much energy as heat as they create in RF. Engineers have dealt with that for many years. They did it for satellites way before there were cell phones.
The various cell phone protocols are designed with power conservation (battery life) in mind. I would be surprised if someone found a way to dramatically improve the situation without a major breakthrough in semiconductors. ie. If they could use class D or E, they could improve efficiency but that would require switching speeds ten times what we can now achieve.
web.eecs.umich.edu/~stark/HKU_Talk1.pdf
What this article never really manages to describe is Envelope Tracking (ET). This has been in development for several years. Look at the diagram in http://www.nujira.com/technology-pa-746.php for a better description of the concept. This article describes the application of ET in the handset.
On more modern / powerful phones with larger screens, it is not the radio that is the dominant problem anymore. It is the screen.
If you are "Streaming video" for any length of time with a 4.5" screen phone, it is the screen using most of the battery, not the radio. Screen battery use is also bad because it even affects you in airplane mode.
This seems to be solving yesterday's battery problem - but any gain is good I guess.
That's odd, every time I look at my phone's battery consumption it always tells me that my primary power drain is the screen.
"The technology" turns out to be called "asymmetric multilevel outphasing". No wonder the submission was too embarrassed to include this tidbit. Small problem, though. Nerds don't omit.
Empathy represses analytic thought, and vice versa
Even for nerds it turns out that dog paddling through life in the default network generates more discussion forum page views. Somewhere a kitten dies.
If you ever go into your settings to see battery usage, you'll notice it's not the radios or the amplifiers, it's the *display* that uses the vast majority of the battery power. Sure, we need to get more efficient radios, but let's really go after getting the display technology much more power efficient, while at the same time coming up with a much more efficient battery technology than lithium ion or lithium polymer. Graphene and other battery technologies in the works look promising.
I always thought it was the backlight that used the power? My phone can be on standby for 3 days, yet 1 hour of ebook reading in flight mode kills the battery.
No, they're all just morons.
My Galaxy Nexus with AMOLED screen starts at 100% charge while plugged into USB charging and in 10 minutes is at 99% ... in an hour it's below 95%... if I'm running the Facebook app. That's with the screen off most of that time, too. The Facebook app chews a TON of data, and pushing the H+ 4G that hard drains battery faster than it can charge.
I removed the Facebook app and put in the Facebook Messenger app instead. Much more benign, almost no data usage.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
If you've noticed your phone getting warm and rapidly draining the battery when streaming video or sending large files, blame the power amplifiers
No. I'll blame the bits that actually make heat, such as the screen backlight, and the CPU and GPU when displaying video.
If the amplifier running at 50% efficiency when you're running maximum 0.125W for HSDPA or 0.25watt for GSM is causing your phone to heat up then you're doing it wrong!
Except for most modern smart phones, screens take up a bulk of the battery's power.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
This sounds like old technology. They have been doing what sounds like the same thing in audio for years.
Your electrical utility bill may be cheaper when you take the strain off their infrastructure. Infrastructure companies like the status quo; when they build out, there's a long wait for ROI.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I haven't had to charge my phone twice in one day in over 5 years, when I moved away from a piece of crap Motorola Razr.
This might come as a huge shock: don't play games on your phone for hours at a time, and you don't burn the battery down.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
bluetooth + screen + call drains the battery faster than it can charge as well.
Radio power usage is probably 70-90% of a device's standby power usage.
So it'll be great for standby time/background data power costs, not so much when the screen is on.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
We're talking about Smartphones. Talking is hardly the only activity that requires active transmission. Facebook, Twitter, email, music streaming, Latitude-like apps, all require regular transmission of data.
Dilbert RSS feed
The initial market will be in the developing world, where 640,000 diesel-powered generators are used to power base stations, chewing through $15 billion worth of fuel per year.
This quote from the company gives the economics away. The monetary savings from the new base station amplifier's efficiency likely do not offset the increased purchase cost -- for stations wired to the grid. So they're selling it as a way of decreasing cost and re-fuel frequency for off-grid stations.
I just made an 11m 37s call and Voice Calls went from 0% to 13%. I can believe it.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I'm not quite as quick to call bullshit on this claim as I am with the articles claiming to solve the energy crisis. I spent four years writing code for modules that interacted directly with bastations, but without even a taste of a technical explaination why there is something wrong with the amplifier, it's a coinflip.
I wish this sort of journalism came with citations, so I could no for certain whether the author is dumbing things down to avoid scaring away the non-technical audience, or because they are lazy bastards who copy-pasted a press release without bothering to investigate if there was any validity to the claims.
Not sure where TFA gets the idea this will double the battery life on my phone since the "power usage" page shows the vast bulk (70% or more) goes to powering the display, with low double digits (or even single digits) powering the various radios.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
On first read I wanted to say: "yes please" then noted that hand sets would be years out.
So good thing my provider contract is so far out.
Then my brother called from the storm zone in NJ. The cell coverage was
fragile and he noted that most towers in his area were down for want of
battery power and no mains to recharge them.
We need ethecical rules to limit calls to a short period and text only.
We need more durable towers. We need "storm modes" that conserve batteries automagically
and log a location that can be sent with ease via text.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
to that of Toshi Station power converters? I think I could manager to pick up a few on my way home before dinner.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.