As you can tell by my Chairing the Green Mobility Session at Interop , I have a strong interest in power conservation and getting the most out of a battery. So, while it may not be possible to significantly advance the capabilities of batteries themselves, as I previously noted, there’s a lot we can do to maximize battery life on the demand side. I recently spoke with senior managers at Quantance , a company that’s doing something really interesting here – and something that I think could have very far-reaching benefits. How about not just better battery life, but also much higher throughput in the bargain? Interested?
Well, I am. As I’ve previously noted, the key techniques for optimizing battery life are better power efficiency in terms of semiconductor (and other components, especially displays) process technology, chip design and implementation, and board design and implementation, as well as improved wireless power-saving protocols. But the part of the radio that consumes the most power is the transmit power amplifier (PA), and there’s only so far that we can go with improving the inherent power efficiency of this circuitry. A better idea is to carefully manage the power that this component draws, and to make sure that the uplink implemented here (the connection from the mobile device to the infrastructure) is as reliable as possible. Since that reliability is a function of being able to successfully acknowledge the receipt of a downlink transmission, so as to avoid unnecessary, power-consuming retransmissions, the idea of a “controller” for the PA makes a lot of sense.
And that is what Quantance has implemented. This is a pure-analog part, with no impact on the remainder of a handset’s design other than perhaps lower cost due to elimination of other components no longer required. Hence not only will the use of the Quantance approach result in improved battery life, it might also be free. The ROI could be significant regardless, again in terms of battery life and raw throughput.
But, very interestingly, there’s also a benefit here for the carriers. A more reliable link takes some of the pressure off the need for more capacity. Sure, the carriers are going to need to build more base stations no matter what as subscriber populations and their demand for data services continue to grow. But no matter how much capacity the network has, making the best use of it will always be key to better service for customers, as well as better ROI for carriers.
