Technology to Make your Battery Last longer

Written by: Ray Toombs on November 1, 2012.

If you are reading this then you probably have an Android device, and I am sure you would love it if your device lasted longer than one day.  Joel Dawson and David Perreault, founders of Eta Devices have developed a new power amplifier design that results in twice the battery life for certain devices, including smartphones.

Now, the technology still has a long way to go before it will be available in smartphones, but for a quick understanding of what they are working on.

“RF power amplifiers change low-power radio signals into high-power signals, but the inefficient way in which this is accomplished is where cellphones lose power.”

This new product will first be applied on the LTE Base stations they are saying some time next year.

“Currently, it cost $36 billion to power cellular base stations, consuming nearly 1% of global power consumption. 640,000 diesel-powered generators are used to power base stations at a price of $15 billion paid for fuel every year”

Below is some insight on what this new technology will be doing and bringing to the table.

“The power amplifiers on your phone use power in two modes, output mode and standby. Using the lowest amount of standby power would improve efficiency, but switching from low-power standby to high-power output distorts the signal. Therefore the current technology calls for keeping the levels of standby power high, wasting a lot of electricity just to keep the power on. For high data rate communications, the device keeps more standby power than signal power and this is what makes your phone run hot. Eta’s solution is to run different voltages across the transistor and the one with the lowest power consumption is selected. This is done an incredible 20 million times per second. Eta calls this process “asymmetric multilevel out phasing.”

I know that is a lot of information to take in and it’s way over my head, but let’s just say this is going to be big for the smartphone world.

Source :  MITTechnologyReview via BGR

Meet the Author: Ray Toombs (59 Posts)

I have been a Droid addict since I got my first OG Droid (Motorola A855), it took me about 3 months to root and I was hooked. I now have multiple devices and each one of them supplies me with my daily dose of Android love. Outside of Android I also love reef aquariums and I am a workaholic to support my family and three beautiful girls and would do anything for them and love that they are always interested in daddy's Android toys.