Who Needs Power Cords? New Technologies Bring Hope for Long Battery Life

From laptops to music and video players, mobility has become the must-have feature. Yet as devices become more portable, their ability to stay mobile for long decreases dramatically. The travel killer is the battery, that bundle of chemistry that promises unfettered power so long as an electrical outlet is within easy reach.

Battery life is the one maddening constant in an ever-advancing electronic world. Recent scientific breakthroughs and new power-loathing components may finally deliver the Holy Grail of cordless computing: a battery that runs for days without a recharge.

While most laptops already employ power-reducing elements both in hardware and software systems, five new technologies promise power reserves far beyond the simple tricks currently in use.

High Fiber Batteries

Power conservation methods are important, but the battery-life problem ultimately requires a battery-centric solution. A new nanotechnology breakthrough at Stanford University just might provide the answer. Stanford's research team, led by Yi Cui, replaced the carbon anode of a lithium-ion battery-the part that stores the positively-charged power-with a forest of silicon "nanowires." Normally, silicon becomes brittle and useless from the constant charge/drain cycles demanded from Li-ion batteries. But Cui's team found that the silicon filaments retained their strength even after repeated charges.

The electrical breakthrough, published in the January 2008 issue of Nature Nanotechnology, claims a ten-fold increase in battery power. Despite the dramatic enhancement in power storage, the new batteries will weigh the same as their carbon counterparts. While commercial production of these new batteries is still a few years off, the chance to replace four-hour relics with 40-hour powerhouses will certainly be worth the wait.

Lighting That's Light on Power

Flat panel LCDs (Liquid Crystal Displays) depend on backlighting to make their crisp and colorful displays visible, especially in darkened office cubicles. In the 1970s, LCD watches replaced the older LED (Light Emitting Diode) variety primarily due to lowered power requirements. But in an ironic twist, the power-hungry LED is the perfect low-power solution for LCD backlighting.

Common backlighting solutions in laptops can demand as much as one-third of the available battery power. New high-efficiency LED backlighting uses 10-15 percent less power than conventional backlighting, extending battery life in a typical laptop by 30 to 45 minutes. The new 2008 Apple MacBook Air employs LED backlighting for both display and keyboard, yet its super-thin battery can power the device for five hours.

Flashier Hard Drives

Technology has traversed the path from washing-machine-sized 1MB hard drives to palm-sized 100GB devices in just a few decades. Despite advances, these mini-record-players still require a constant source of power to keep their discs spinning and ready for data. A few years ago, hard drive manufacturers shipped "hybrid" drives that used flash memory as a data buffer, lessening the need for constant platter access. But with flash memory prices at a premium, the advantage of these drives was difficult to justify.

With memory cards now ubiquitous in cameras, music players, and even picture frames, the price-per-megabyte for flash is dropping rapidly. Add to this the ever-increasing storage density for flash chips and you have the makings of a universal laptop upgrade to flash-based solid state hard drives (SSDs). These new "flashy" devices have no moving parts, no spinning platters, are faster, more reliable, and most importantly have no constant power needs. Even during disk access, SSDs require less than half the power of standard hard disks, and their reduced heat generation means that the laptop fan doesn't need to work as hard either.

PC Parts on a Power Diet

True road warriors hate obese components, those computer parts that gobble up the battery's precious electrons. So hardware manufacturers have begun putting such parts on a strict electron diet.

Intel released its new 45nm (nanometer) CPU in January 2008, to be quickly followed by an entire 45nm chipset about a half year later. The 45nm manufacturing process with its smaller and more densely-packed elements is a big improvement over the older 65nm method. Closer elements translate into shorter commute times for electrons, and fewer trips to the energy pump. The newer chips also have the ability to hover at a near-death idle state, reducing power demands by 5% to 15%.

As exciting as the 45nm advancement is, Intel is already planning for a smaller 32nm series starting in 2009. But it's not just CPUs that have shed the power hunger. USB 3.0, the next release of the popular peripheral connectivity protocol, is also promising reduced power consumption despite offering ten times the data transmission speed of its 2.0 edition. Add to that the power-reducing features now included in the on-board systems of laptops and you have components ready for the next diet infomercial.

Near Powerless Wireless

Power reductions within your laptop will account for big battery-life savings, but wireless systems that focus their attention outside of the computer are also reducing their power needs. Two years ago, professor Hui Wu from the University of Rochester, designed a new wireless system that uses just 10% of the power needed by on-the-market solutions. Wu's technology breakthrough, which targets the popular WiFi wireless standard found in most laptops, saves power by reducing the constant chatter between multiple in-range wireless devices.

Coupled with this improvement is the newest WiFi offering, the 802.11n protocol. While this new upgrade of WiFi naturally offers higher transmission speeds and broader geographic ranges, some vendors are also claiming a reduction in power usage that can add an hour of battery life to a typical wireless-enabled laptop.

Battery life has long lagged behind other technology advances. While some of these new breakthroughs are a few years from market, together they promise to lift the battery to its rightful place as the true power source of portable computing.