Efficient Power Amplifier Could Double Battery Life of Smartphones

The modern smartphone is the Hungry Hungry Hippo of the electronics world. Tablets, e-readers, and even notebooks are more efficient than the power-sucking smartphone in your pocket. While battery technology is slowly moving forward, an MIT spinout company is working to reduce the power consumed by not only smartphones but the base stations that keep them connected to the world.

MIT Technology review reports that startup Eta Devices is bench testing a new power amplifier chip that consumes less power than those currently found in smartphones and base stations. Power amplifier chips transform electricity into radio signals and keep your smartphone connected to your carrier’s network.

In current power amplifier chips the standby mode pulls a hefty amount of power in order to be ready to communicate with cell towers. Smartphones like the iPhone 5 have up to five power amplifier chips in them. These chips lose more than 65 percent of their energy to heat. It’s the reason your smartphone gets warm when you download large files.

Eta Devices hopes to create a single chip that would regulate the amount of power needed by the radio by determining how much power is needed as many as 20 million times per second. Called asymmetric multilevel outphasing, the new technology would find the optimal energy usage needed by the radio without sacrificing the connection between smartphone and cell tower.

The first application of the new technology will be in cell towers in 2013, according to the company. Towers currently lose 67 percent of their energy to heat and need to have cooling units installed to keep the power amplifiers from overheating. According to Eta Devices CEO Mattias Astrom, their chips will reduce the energy needed by towers by 50 percent.

Once the technology hits smartphones, the mad search for an available power outlet at around 2 p.m. might go the way of searching for a pay phone when got a page on your beeper.

Source : wired