Think about how many times you charge your smartphone each day. Chances are it’s a lot more often than you’d like to and some of us are even charging our handsets multiple times just to have enough juice to last through an entire day. So imagine how amazing it would be to wake up to a fully-loaded battery and retire the same night without some flashing, glaring reminder that your phone is fixing to die. This may not be just a dream though, if the group at ETA Devices has anything to say about it.
ETA Devices is a spinoff company that was co-founded by MIT electrical engineering professors David Perreault and Joel Dawson. This group has been working on some incredibly innovative technologies and delving into potential solutions for some of the most annoying issues to affect today’s consumer technology. In fact, the duo claims to have “cracked the efficiency problem (of smartphones) with a new amplifier design.”
A recent report from MIT states that the traditional chipset in a mobile device wastes approximately 65 percent of its capacity. This power loss comes from within the power amplifier, an internal device which transfers electricity into radio signals. According to the report, this device not only consumes power when it is sending out signals for digital data, but also consumes energy when simply sitting in standby mode. Because of this, MIT has estimated that the only way to lengthen battery life is to decrease the amount of power consumed when the handset is in standby mode.
The report also outlines that ETA Devices has crafted a “a blazingly fast electronic gearbox” that is capable of monitoring a variety of voltages within a given device. This gearbox makes use of a created technology called asymmetric multilevel outphasing, a process that constantly monitors different voltages and chooses which ones will decrease overall battery consumption. This technology works with the outposting of data too and monitors consumption whenever the device is sending and receiving signals.
The group is expected to unveil its technology soon (possibly as early as 2013), even though it is still currently in its beginning stages. The gearboxes will be able to monitor voltages in a variety of different chipsets and frequencies, including GSM, CDMA, and 4G LTE. For an example of this device’s potential importance take a look at the iPhone 5, which currently makes use of five different chips concerning data and radio waves. ETA Devices’ impressive new tech could quickly analyze these five chips and create a streamlined environment that closely monitored high and unnecessary voltages. The end result would be a fully efficient iPhone 5 with a very extended battery life.
Analysts expect ETA Devices to officially reveal this new tech sometime in February 2013 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Perhaps then we will get a better glimpse at the amazing possibilities that this new discovery is promising. Until then, all we can do is hope that this breakthrough will finally end the frustrating practice of endlessly charging our smartphones.
