We hear almost weekly about new battery technology that’s going to bring week-long battery life or battery tech that’s going to bring higher safety and eco-friendly characteristics. The truth of the matter is rather boring though. The whole consumer battery and consumer device electronics industry hinges on a huge Lithium Ion Industry. The 18650 industry-standard Li-Ion cell, for example, is possibly the most common component you’ll find across the whole range of consumer electronic devices and is manufactured in billion-plus quantities per year. Its a huge market and one that major investments have been made into for long-term profits. How can anyone expect this to change overnight? It won’t. The process of making Li-Ion batteries is so established that it would take either a major disaster or major government intervention to change it. Well thats my opinion anyway! And that’s why I think it makes sense to take not of what’s being said inside the current consumer electronics industry and to put aside the dreams of the gadget blogs!
I’ve been looking in detail at some of the presentations given in sessions that took place at IDF Fall and there are some excellent PDF downloads available. The session on battery life – “All day and Beyond” is the one I’m looking at here…
It covers a number of angles from Intel’s ‘Deep Power Down’ technology state that will be new on the Penryn architechture, thorough software design and on to battery technology.
Before I talk about the battery tech though, take a look at the two diagrams below. The first is from an estimation I did in 2006 about how various components in a ultra mobile PC take battery power. The second is one from Intel showing a further breakdown including HDD, Wifi and memory. The accuracy of these diagrams is unimportant. What is important is that both diagrams show that its not just about CPU when it comes to battery usage. Every person in the ultra mobile PC design chain has a part to play and the only way to produce a device with good battery life is to combine best-of-breed components and design with an energy-aware software layer. [This creates a huge opportunity for a new, Internet and efficiency focused operating system by the way and that’s where Moblin comes in.]
Underpinning all these components of course is the battery. Battery tech is the one thing that, when improved, helps with a 1:1 ration. Where a 10x increase in CPU efficiency brings just a 0.1 improvement in battery life or a 50% drop in backlighting power brings just a 10% increase in battery life, a 10% increase in battery capacity brings just that. 10% battery life improvement. A fairly obvious point but worth mentioning.
Two slides in the presentation jump out at me. The first is the one from Panasonic who develop advanced Li-Ion battery technology. In today’s umpc’s, the best of the bunch are using the 2.8A.h, 3.7v cells. Three of these provide around 30W/hr of capacity. You’ll find that configuration in the Samsung Q1 range. Panasonic think they can push that up by 10% in the next generation. Thats about another 30 minutes in the current generation of UMPCs. Not very impressive is it!
The second slide is from Z|Power. They are presenting Silver Zinc technology as a safer, higher capacity alternative to Li-Ion. Their solution is said to offer 20-30% longer run-time. Unfortunately, they appear to be comparing their tech against older Li-Ion tech and in fact, there doesn’t seem to be much improvement at all over the advanced Li-Ion technology that Panasonic were presenting. Not very impressive is it!
There was no mention of Lithium Polymer batteries which are gaining popularity due to their better safety and more useable shape (flat rather than round.) but in previous articles I’ve read, its clear that this technology is also only advancing at similar rates to existing technologies. Not very impressive is it!
The realisation of all day battery life isn’t going to be achieved through advances in battery technology. Its going to be a hard job of pulling together component manufacturers and software engineers and getting everyone to design with battery life in mind. That means small-step improvements, more costs and a slow change. My predictions stay as they were before. Battery life will increase at around 20% per year and here’s what what you will get in real terms:
- 2006 – Average ultra mobile PC life 2.5 hours
- 2007 – Average ultra mobile PC life 3 hours
- 2008 – Average ultra mobile PC life 3.6 hours
- 2009 – Average ultra mobile PC life 4.3 hours
- 2010 – Average ultra mobile PC life 5 hours.
Lets put a marketing twist on those figures because just like all manufacturers do, we could use ‘minimum load’ figures:
- 2006 – Average ultra mobile PC life 4 hours
- 2007 – Average ultra mobile PC life 4.8 hours
- 2008 – Average ultra mobile PC life 5.75 hours
- 2009 – Average ultra mobile PC life 6.9 hours
- 2010 – Average ultra mobile PC life 8.3 hours.
Those figures are based on a 7″ device. For a 4.8″ MID-style device with SSD I would add about 20% to those figures meaning that you will probably see 4 hour averages for MIDS in 2008 (The Raon Digital Everun is a good platform to make comparisons with) with idle use extending into the 6-hour range. Standby figures should be measured, as they are with many devices now, in days.
So i’m sorry if you started reading this article thinking ‘great, here’s the info I’ve been waiting for’ because it really isn’t that exciting! All day battery life would be great but for the moment, the four-hour mark seems to be the most achievable point in the short term. I don’t know about you but 4 real hours doesn’t sound so bad to me.
