Powering up a new breed of batteries

Vendors seek to give portable devices better endurance.

No matter how portable gadgets become, there's a time when they all must come back to earth: recharging time.

As a result, the quest for longer battery life still occupies much development time. For proof of this just look at new technologies for mobile devices. Whether they are screens, processors, storage or other components, they usually share the advantage of lower power consumption.

Much of the development work is focused on making batteries based on current technologies, such as lithium ion, last longer, and an increasing amount of time is being spent looking into new technologies such as fuel cells.

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No matter how portable gadgets become, there's a time when they all must come back to earth: recharging time.

As a result, the quest for longer battery life still occupies much development time. For proof of this just look at new technologies for mobile devices. Whether they are screens, processors, storage or other components, they usually share the advantage of lower power consumption.

Much of the development work is focused on making batteries based on current technologies, such as lithium ion, last longer, and an increasing amount of time is being spent looking into new technologies such as fuel cells.

"Lithium ion has been improving at a rate of about 9% per year since a decade ago when Sony introduced the first" battery based on this technology, says Ric Fulop, co-founder of A123 Systems , a start-up that's developed a high-power battery. The company has attracted investments from Qualcomm and Motorola. Although it's initially focusing on high-current devices such as power tools, it sees opportunities in the electronics sector.

Fulop says lithium ion capacities have increased from around 2.2Ah (ampere hours) a few years ago to about 2.6Ah, and there's room for continued improvement.

Japan's Matsushita Battery Industrial said earlier this year that it's working with Intel on a lithium ion battery that will have a capacity of 2.9Ah. Scheduled to be available in April, it should keep a laptop running for about eight hours.

However, there are limits to the technology, Fulop says.

"You are reaching the limits and it's not going to get much better," he says. Making a better battery means messing with materials and that's a battle against nature. "You don't have the same capability with materials science as Moore's Law. That's why the rate of improvement has only been 9% per year." Companies also are working on speedier recharging so devices are up and running again faster.

Toshiba has developed a prototype lithium ion battery that can absorb about 80% of the battery's total power capacity in about one minute. That's much faster than the typical charging rate of 2% to 3% of total capacity per minute. The new battery could make it possible to quickly bring a dead laptop back to life.

Although lithium ion remains the king in portable gadgets, one of the most talked-about new technologies is the fuel cell. These create electricity from a simple reaction, typically that of a methanol and water mixture and air. They're generating interest because they can provide a relatively large amount of power from a small amount of inexpensive fuel and are environmentally friendlier than other batteries.

Both Toshiba and NEC have demonstrated direct methanol fuel cells (DMFC) for use with laptop computers. A prototype unveiled by Toshiba at this year's Cebit show in Germany could power a small laptop for 10 hours before it required a recharge in the form of a squirt of methanol, similar to the way a cigarette lighter is refueled. The Toshiba DMFC can provide about 20 watts of power, as can a similar prototype from NEC.