Eta Devices, a spinout from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have developed a chip that could help make the battery in electronic devices last possibly twice as long, and help conserve energy in cell towers.

The main cause of power draining out of a mobile device's battery is an inefficient power amplifier, a component that is geared to generate radio signals of the smartphone through its antennas. They are similar to the larger modules found in wireless base stations, where they might require at least 10 times or, at most, a hundred times the power.

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To be ready to send and receive considerably large packs of data at any given time, the amplifiers are kept at maximum voltage, readily consuming electricity -- with approximately 75 percent of power consumption in the cell towers, and more than any other component inside the smartphone -- and wasting over 50 percent of the energy provided as heat. The electricity consumed by the power-hungry amplifiers result in short battery lives of smartphones, and base stations that lose money by wasting energy.

Eta Devices, on the other hand, has developed a chip for smartphones and a module the size of a shoebox for base stations, which were based on a decade-long research at MIT, to cut the wasted energy by essentially "switching gears" and adjusting the voltage supply to power the amplifiers when a specific amount of electricity is needed.

"You can look at our technology as a high-speed gearbox that, every few nanoseconds, modulates the amount of power that the power amplifier draws from the battery," Joel Dawson, Eta Devices' chief technology officer and a former associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science who co-invented the technology, explained. "That turns out to be the key to keeping the efficiency very high."

When it was used in a trial at a base station in the previous year, the module by Eta Devices became the transmitter for 4G LTE networks to attain a mean efficiency more than 70 percent, Dawson said.

"The highest number we've heard before that was 45 percent - and that's probably being generous," he added.

TagsPower saving technology, Chip, BATTERY LIFE, battery life saving tips, Energy consumption, Energy saver, Radio amplifier