Breakthrough Promises Smartphones that Use Half the Power 110
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."
Re:Not another one... (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad the article has nothing to do with battery technology, and you look a fool.
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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.
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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 amplifie
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The word "battery" never appears in the headline, so maybe you didn't read that either.
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Call the statistics police (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do I not believe that 1% of global electrical production goes to powering wireless base stations.
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Yeah, I dont believe them either.
Re:Call the statistics police (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Why do I not believe that 1% of global electrical production goes to powering wireless base stations.
Probably due to the fact that all of IT consumes about 1% of all power globally
[citation needed] [newscientist.com] - yours is the only estimate I have seen which is so low.
Economical for off-grid base stations? (Score:2)
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.
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Screen? (Score:2)
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.
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In addition to this, another key part of improving transmission has been improvements in DSP processing power to lift usable signals out of the noise. Unless you can find a unique way to improve the efficiency of the algorithm they use, you're going to have to wait for a die shrink to improve power consumption of that portion of the cellular chipset.
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Not to mention that cellular radios are extremely power efficient because they have to be. The power amp is only used for transmission, and only powered up the instant th
Nah. (Score:1)
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Did you read his last sentence?
Re:Nah. (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Nah. (Score:5, Informative)
Besides, in heavily populated area's the number of antennas has nothing to do with transmit power, but with maximum throughput.
Re:Android battery stats (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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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.
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bluetooth + screen + call drains the battery faster than it can charge as well.
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What technology? Who built it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please keep me warm... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Please keep me warm... (Score:5, Funny)
Friction.
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Increased blood flow.
Watson arrives (Score:2, Funny)
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 wi
It's network (Score:1)
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.
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I dont blame power amplifiers (Score:5, 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.
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I agree with your general point, but non-smartphones do not have overall longer talk times than smartphones. They do have long standby times though.
Re:I dont blame power amplifiers (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.
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Pretty much every android device out there is now rated above 7 hours talk time. I don't know what planet you come from, but that is easily double what smart phones did 4 years ago when they weren't dominant of the cell market.
Motorola actually did what you are suggesting in their Droid Razr model, offering one with a 2.5x capacity battery called 'Maxx" or some such. Very few people sprang the extra money for the extra battery because 8 hours talk time was already sufficient. Most people aren't power users
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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 me
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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 batt
Re:I dont blame power amplifiers (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Beg to differ, On my last two devices, display usually ranked 2nd or 3rd to cell standby and phone calls. Only on occasions where I had an extended game session or a movie did it ever break 30% usage.
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If you leave your Galaxy Nexus unattended and plugged into USB to charge with the Facebook app running in the background, I'd be surprised if it lasted a whole day. The first time I installed the FB app, I didn't even use it and my phone started struggling for power (slowly losing charge WHILE CHARGING). Looked in data usage, found that in 5 minutes the FB app had pulled 4 times my total data consumption for the past MONTH from all other apps. Deleted that shitfest.
In 1 hour I lost more than 5% battery
Smartphones that Use Half the power (Score:5, Funny)
Breakthrough Promises Smartphones that Use Half the Power
Seems inefficient, wouldn't it be better if they used all the power?
I Welcome this 'breakthrough in energy saving' (Score:1)
Class C (Score:5, Insightful)
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Real measure of efficiency (Score:1)
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
Re:Class C (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Yup. As a point of reference:
A typical FM station's power amplifier is Class C and can achieve 70-90% efficiency. BTW, the new digital "HD Radio" is a nightmare for these guys, as while the OFDM signal used only needs 1-10% of the RF transmit power to achieve the same range, with typical amp technology back in 2003 or so, that meant 15-20% efficiency at best.
For UMTS signals, which have a pretty high peak-to-average ratio, if a PA achieved 17-20% efficiency, that was REALLY good back then. There were a f
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Based on the article it sounds a lot like envelope tracking:
But looking back at one of their papers: http://www-mtl.mit.edu/~jldawson/Dawson_digest2009.pdf [mit.edu] it is not exactly envelope tracking
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The basic idea they have is somewhat novel, but requires some understanding on how modern output stage power amplifiers are designed.
As mentioned by many, a "C" class amplifier can be designed so it's pretty linear over a certain range, but with variable-envelope modulation schemes used in modern communications, they waste quite a bit of power.
On the other hand, classic pwm (pulse-width modulation) switch mode power amplifers (aka D-class amplifiers), allow trading pusle-width modulation for amplitude modul
Re:Class C (Score:5, Informative)
> 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. :)
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(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 resi
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> 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
But the phase correction that you're talking about is mostly used with big reactive loads. Yes, you can save a ton of money in that case. But except for the HVAC and (possibly) the UPS units that back up the power, that doesn't really apply to cell sites. Besides, the application discussed in the article is for the transmitters only. Has nothing to do with these ot
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The basic concept of modulating the supply voltage is obvious... Getting it to actually WORK properly without excessive distortion of the output signal is *not*.
You might be able to build what they're talking about with chips from DK or Mouser - but the actual techniques for using those ICs in concert with each other without making the output signal garbage are not obvious.
Seriously - you're going to need a $80k-120k spectrum analyzer and a $30-50k signal generator just to be able to properly test the syst
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that doesn't really apply to cell sites
Which is the point. All that shit doesn't apply to cell towers, but cutting back their power usage would be worth a lot of money. Therefor since we can imply great demand for an imaginary product--anything you can shove on-site at expensive private-owned major infrastructure and drop your continuous costs by enough to offset the cost of the magical widget is de-facto "in great demand"--we can imply that if that product does not exist, it is not obvious. If you know how to do it but it's extremely expensi
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This is onl
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In a residential setting, however, the general whole-house power factor corrector isn't helpful: most loads aren't the type that need tuning
That, and I've heard that residential customers don't have to pay the power company for reactive load (e.g., imaginary power), just resistive load (e.g., real power). Industrial customers have to pay for both, which is why they build those capacitor banks.
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Class A amps are the least effecient. Class AB is common for high fidielity, but still run in a transistors linear reigon generating heat.
The high power car stereo industry has been using switch mode PWM transistors to drive high power sub bass for a long time. This is not new tech. It is new tot he cell phone industry.
Class D is switched Mode PWM.
Class G&H are variable Switched mode power supplies that vary the voltage provided to the amplifiers to increase effeciency.
These classes do not have the f
The actual paper... (Score:1)
...is here: http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/62479/712059703.pdf?sequence=1
A Gadget? (Score:5, Insightful)
Any article that calls an important piece of technology a "gadget" is neither serious nor credible.
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Any article that calls an important piece of technology a "gadget" is neither serious nor credible.
Why? What's wrong with "gadget?" Do you have a problem with the British calling scientists "boffins"? There's no difference between "device" and "gadget"; they're synonyms. Do you trash articles that say "count" rather than "enumerate"?
Envelope tracking (Score:5, Informative)
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Battery usage (Score:2)
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.
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The battery isn't controlled by the OS. Each time a process runs, the OS stops another process and schedules the waiting process onto the CPU, setting up all the page mappings and registers and then context switching into userspace at saved EIP. It knows how much CPU is used for what task because it schedules it. As for the battery, it roughly understand how much power various components are supposed to draw and makes an educated guess.
My Galaxy Nexus tells me Phone Idle 50%, Cell Standby 22%, Screen 15
asymmetric multilevel outphasing (Score:2)
"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 [eurekalert.org]
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.
It's not the bulk of what takes up phone power (Score:1)
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Samsung Galaxy SIII. Running on battery for 26 hours, 10 minutes. 61% charge remaining.
Cell Standby 59% (battery used by cell radio)
Android System 20% (battery used by apps)
Device idle 7%
Screen 6% (time on 45m 32s)
Exchange 4%
Android OS 4%
So in my case, for the past 24 hours, the radio has consumed ~10x as much battery power as the screen (which was on 3% of the day, a not insignificant amount)
Isn't the backlight really the problem? (Score:2)
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.
Heat? (Score:2)
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!
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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!
No, no... you're holding it wrong. :)
It's the screens.. (Score:2)
Except for most modern smart phones, screens take up a bulk of the battery's power.
sounds like old tech (Score:2)
Charge 2x per day? (Score:2)
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.
Radio not the biggest power draw by far (Score:1)
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.
Good thing my contract is so long. (Score:1)
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
How does the dissipative loss compare (Score:1)
to that of Toshi Station power converters? I think I could manager to pick up a few on my way home before dinner.