Amplifier cuts smartphone energy consumption in half

Transmitting stations should also need less electricity

The US start-up Eta Devices http://etadevices.com has developed a new type of signal amplifier. With the new technology developed by two MIT professors http://web.mit.edu was developed, the power consumption of smartphones and transmitter stations for cellular networks should be halved in the future, as Technology Review reports. The innovation could save enormous amounts of electricity and money. The technology is to be officially presented at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February 2013. The new devices are to be used first in developing countries.

Efficient use of electricity

Modern cell phones waste a lot of electricity when sending and receiving data in the mobile data network. This is also due to the inefficient high-frequency amplifiers that are used in the cell phones. The five such components that are in an iPhone 5 are responsible for up to 60 percent of the total energy consumption. The transmitter stations used to set up the cellular networks use the same technology and thus consume almost one percent of the electricity generated worldwide. More than 65 percent of the energy in the amplifiers goes unused - mostly in the form of heat.

Eta Devices has now built prototypes for amplifiers that are more than twice as efficient as previous concepts. The savings result from a smart reduction in power consumption in standby mode. Previous amplifiers used a lot of power in standby mode. Large jumps in consumption in the actual signal transmission should be avoided because they can distort the signal. As a result, the standby mode uses more energy than the actual signal amplification and cell phones get warm.

Save electricity with your smartphone

Smartphone: amplifier draws electricity (Photo: pixelio.de, Joachim Kirchner)

Less heat

The new amplifiers determine up to 20 million times per second which voltage is guaranteeing the greatest possible efficiency. The technology is to be further developed commercially from 2013 and will initially be used in developing countries, where 640.000 diesel gensets are constantly running to supply the transmission stations of the cellular networks with electricity. Energy-saving amplifier chips could significantly reduce the $ 15 billion currently spent annually for this purpose. In broadcasting stations, around 67 percent of the energy goes to the amplifiers, and a further eleven percent is reserved for cooling.

With the new types of amplifiers, the power requirement can be reduced by around half, while the temperature is lowered at the same time, which means that less energy is required for air conditioning. In the longer term, however, Eta Devices is targeting the smartphone market, which is still growing. The more efficient amplifiers could double the battery life of the devices, which would solve one of the most burning problems facing manufacturers. In the longer term, the scientists involved want to develop a signal amplifier that is not only more efficient, but can also handle all common mobile radio standards. Then five different chips would not have to be built into a mobile phone.

In terms of power saving potential, the potential for individual cell phones is relatively low. "As a consumer, the mobile phone does not play a major role among household appliances, since the power consumption is very low compared to a washing machine, for example," says Heinrich Sigmund from the Austrian Energy Agency http://energyagency.at opposite pressetext.

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