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."

Comments

Call the statistics police

[mattr]

Why do I not believe that 1% of global electrical production goes to powering wireless base stations.

Re:Call the statistics police

[Decker-Mage]

Probably due to the fact that all of IT consumes about 1% of all power globally. And notice in that statistic "about" which, if it comes above 0.0000...01% somehow gets magically gets rounded up (apparently using ceil (APL) function rather than a real rounding function). If they really want to save power generated capacity, they really should look at replacing all those power bricks out there with something remotely efficient before thinking about the power consumption drawn from an, also admittedly, inefficient battery, on the way to the power amps.

Matters not much, methinks, as no one is going to take advantage of the new designs until (1) they are incorporated into "stock" parts and (2) they are cheaper than the designs they are replacing. Almost forgot, and no one is still running a fire sale on the old chips.

Articles like these, long on promise, short on economics, or long on threat, and short on the same thing, economics, piss me off.

Re:Not another one...

[Scytheford]

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

What technology? Who built it?

[complete loony]

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"

Please keep me warm...

[zippo01]

But what will keep me warm on those long lonely nights while I watching inappropriate things on my phone?

Re:Please keep me warm...

[ozmanjusri]

Friction.

Watson arrives

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nah.

[Neil Boekend]

Nope, because it doesn't increase the range of the antenna. The same limits to transmitted power apply, no matter what technology you use to transmit it.
Besides, in heavily populated area's the number of antennas has nothing to do with transmit power, but with maximum throughput.

I dont blame power amplifiers

[aXis100]

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.

Re:I dont blame power amplifiers

[icebrain]

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.

Re:I dont blame power amplifiers

[Spacelord]

It really is mostly the displays. On Android phones you can see what is using the battery, and it's almost always 60-70% the display.

As for those multicore CPUs, modern smartphone operating systems are remarkably good at keeping them clocked down when they're not needed. As a matter of fact, if I leave my Galaxy Nexus unattended (i.e. don't use the display), there hardly is any battery drain. I wouldn't be surprised if it would last a whole week that way.

Re:I dont blame power amplifiers

[icebrain]

I only got a smartphone two-something years ago. Prior to that, I had a dumb phone with extended battery; after three and a half years, I still got 3-4 days between charges. When new, I charged it once a week, and that was with heavy talk usage. So even today's smartphones seem to have short lives compared to that.

I have an extended battery on my current phone (rooted Samsung droid charge), and I still have to charge it every day, at least during the week (but that's also because I now work in a large metal building with very poor signal inside). I don't use much data, either, but "cell standby" is usually in the top two list of power consumers on my phone.

I'd be happy with just an extended battery option on future phones, though it would be nice if things like cases and covers were available for phones fitted with said batteries.

The "thin!" mantra is getting ridiculous, though; when I got my current phone I asked about an extended battery and the sales people just got a blank look. "Why would you want that?" they asked. "You could get the wireless charger and then the phone would still be thin! You could get a car charger! Why would you make the phone not thin?!" It blew their minds that someone might not care about thinness, or might even prefer a little thickness.

Re:I dont blame power amplifiers

[plover]

Agreed. Phone thickness is not the dimension I have a problem with. Length, width, and mass are my most important constraints. The iPhone 3 and 4 is about my ideal size - the iPhone 5 is a bit too long for convenience and comfort. However, the iPhone 4 would certainly benefit from a larger viewable screen area - thinner borders, and using more screen area near the earpiece and home button.

What I'd really rather have than a more massive phone would be a replaceable battery. I'd happily keep a spare battery in a dock at home, another in a dock at work, and a third battery in my backpack. Running low on charge? Change it out, wherever I am. If Apple is so damn concerned about sealing their phones so only Apple dealers can change out the batteries, how about instead providing a suite of expensive accessories I'd happily buy?

Re:Android battery stats

[Anne Thwacks]

You must be new on planet news: could save up to 50% means "will probably save less than 5%, but we need a grant".

Smartphones that Use Half the power

[TheInternetGuy]

Breakthrough Promises Smartphones that Use Half the Power

Seems inefficient, wouldn't it be better if they used all the power?

Class C

[GrahamCox]

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.

Re:Class C

[SuricouRaven]

Might be related to those phones supporting four to six different mobile network technologies operating in many different bands.

Re:Class C

[Gordonjcp]

No, the problem is that they need to be linear. You can use class C for FM (and therefore GMSK) because you're running at full carrier power continuously. For 3G, you need a linear amp because QAM has potentially got a variable carrier level. There are tricks you can do to get round this (envelope restoration) which could be what TFA is on about, but it's slashdotted.

Re:Class C

[smpoole7]

> 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?

You're on the right track, but the answer is a bit complicated. (The article, by the way, sounds like a PR piece for someone expecting to patent a technology that, by the same arguments we use against software patents, probably shouldn't be patentable, because it's an obvious rearrangement of existing technology. I shall elucidate.)

1. Yes, it's difficult to run wideband amps in class C. Class C works best with a single frequency at a constant level.

(To illustrate: my wideband HD transmitter, for example, must be re-biased to class AB. I can switch it to "pure" class-C FM mode and it puts out 2-3 times the power as when it's in HD mode.)

2. As a general rule: designing an efficient amplifier becomes more difficult the higher the frequency. Wireless phones run at high frequencies.

(To illustrate: class D switching amps have made it possible for your teenage son to have 1,000 watts of audio in his Nissan Sentra. But you must use a switching frequency that's much higher than the signal -- easy to do with audio, not so easy with even just an 800-900 MHz wireless signal.)

3. Read the fine print and look beyond the smoke.

We just went with Modulation Dependent Carrier Level (MDCL) on our 50,000 watt AM, and it has indeed cut our power bill substantially, which is strikingly analogous to what these people are proposing. But this is highly dependent on modulation (i.e., what we're "playing" at any given moment, whether music or voice) and other factors.

In this case, if they're obtaining the higher efficiency by "smoothly" switching between standby and active modes, one wonders how efficient it will be during rush hour, when everyone is on the phone, calling their significant other to have dinner ready when they get home. :)

Re:Class C

[bluefoxlucid]

(The article, by the way, sounds like a PR piece for someone expecting to patent a technology that, by the same arguments we use against software patents, probably shouldn't be patentable, because it's an obvious rearrangement of existing technology. I shall elucidate.)

There's a scam going on where people sell these big capacitor banks as "Power Savers" to reduce your electricity bill. They work on solid principles. Such things are used in steel mills where big driver loads run by heavy motors have a low power factor. Correcting the power factor greatly improves actual operating efficiency. Some of these mills shut down operations when the power saver fails because it's more expensive to operate without power factor correction than it is to idle the plant. In a residential setting, however, the general whole-house power factor corrector isn't helpful: most loads aren't the type that need tuning, and the box isn't tuned to match the specific load; plus things like refrigerators and computer PSUs now use power factor correction circuitry in them, and of course the boxes they sell for your house are engineered poorly and are generally not great products anyway.

Consider, though, that power factor correction saves so much money that idling a steel mill is less financially damaging than running it without power factor correction.

Hint: If these people bring in shit that drops cell phone tower electricity usage by a significant factor and it actually works, it's not obvious.

Commercial operations eat a ton of power. They pay a premium for being high-load customers. Anything that significantly reduces that load is going to get everyone who understands finances jizzing in their pants.

A Gadget?

[jamesl]

... 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.

Envelope tracking

[Iconoc]

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.

Re:Nah.

[realityimpaired]

My phone can go about 5 days if all I do is idle. That's with Bluetooth and 3G data services/sync turned on, but wifi radio turned off. If I nix Bluetooth and/or data services, I can increase that.

I'm all for reducing power consumption, but if it's not going to reduce the power consumption when the device is actually being used to transmit, then how is it going to increase battery life noticeably when most smartphone users plug it in every day anyway? Besides which, the screen is what eats up the lion's share of my battery... simply decreasing the brightness of the screen makes a huge difference in the life of the battery.

Re:Not another one...

[Verdatum]

Also too bad that, like all the "battery breakthrough" articles, this one has no real content beyond a bunch of unsubstantiated claims and the name of a startup company with nothing but a placeholder website.

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.