Mobile battery life could last for months, says research

by Sarah Griffiths on 14 March 2011, 10:26

Tags: General Business

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Eat your heart out Duracell bunny!

A team of scientists has discovered how to make mobile phones run for months in-between charges.

The electrical engineers based at Illinois University in the States reckon their research could lead to mobiles and laptop batteries lasting up to 100 times longer between charges, The Telegraph reported.

The team has apparently been looking at altering the way a phone or laptop's memory works in a bid to save battery life. 

Currently electricity is passed down skinny metal wires in a phone's memory to retrieve data every time information is accessed, so the engineers have been playing with the size of components based on their theory that smaller components that store and retrieve information would use less electricity.

They reportedly found that battery life could be prolonged by using carbon nanotubes, which are 10,000 times thinner than a human hair instead of the present thin-ish wires.

A graduate student on the team called Feng Xiong, who is also the lead author of the research paper to be published in Science, reportedly said: "The energy consumption is essentially scaled with the volume of the memory bit. By using nanoscale contacts, we are able to achieve much smaller power consumption."

Leader of the project, Professor Eric Pop, reportedly added: "I think anyone who is dealing with a lot of chargers and plugging things in every night can relate to wanting a cell phone or laptop whose batteries can last for weeks or months."

He also apparently reckons that the research could make it possible to run mobile phones by harvesting solar, heat or kinetic energy as the devices would be so energy efficient.



HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

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surely this has been known for a while but it is avoided because of the cost of such materials?
Either the Telegraph article's author is a moron for completely failing to grasp the scientists achievements, or the scientists in question are morons. Energy usage scaled with volume? Wow. You've basically rediscovered Moore's Law. Congrats.
Call be stupid, but isn't this just stating the obvious?

Smaller components = smaller power draw. Generally.
AlexKitch
Smaller components = smaller power draw. Generally.

Generally yes, as you say.

There are other complexities such a smaller components having higher leakage currents, and suchlike. This is why chip manufacturers made the move to “High-K” hafnium transistors in the last few years, because the previous transistor technology (silicon dioxide) leaked too much power as they decreased the component size below about 65 nm. But in general, Moore's law is pretty reliable in stating that as time passes, you get the same functionality for less power, due to the components getting smaller.
I think I need to read the paper, as the article doesn't present anything new. This was actually taught to me many years ago as a basic in my nanoelectronic lectures, the problem though is that if you make it too small and hence the energy required is small enough it actually becomes less than the surrounding ambient temperature energy and so you can't stop transistors switching on etc.