Eta Devices, a fresh chipset manufacturer, is aiming to solve the high battery-drain problems of smartphones and save the environment while they’re at it.
Major chipset manufacturers, such as Qualcomm and MediaTek, are being aggressive in developing 4G-capable SoCs. This has phone manufacturers hard at work, designing new LTE phone models utilizing said chipsets.
Great job on the development front for these chipset companies, but exactly how much will phone performance suffer with respect to power consumption while implementing incredibly high rates of data transfer?
Those that have used battery monitoring apps, will have noticed that the largest sink for battery juice is the phone radio. It seems acceptable that a phone must allocate the majority of its power to the purpose of being a phone, but it turns out that it does not have to be that large a sink.
Power consumption of your phone’s PA
A general power amplifier (PA) for wireless communications contains an active device and a load network. The active device is conventionally a CMOS device which is driven by the RF signal containing the information to be sent through the network. On the other hand the load network consists of an RF choke which stores energy, an impedance matching network that converts the RF-generated information signals coming from the active device to be compatible with the 50Ω antenna load, and the output load which transmits the conditioned information signals to the network’s base station.
during inactivity, or during “standby” mode, the load network still consumes a significant amount of power
The active device and the load network are both powered by the VDD supply of the phone,(i.e. the battery). During active periods of data transmission, the PA will understandably require to use up input power from the battery. However, during inactivity, or during “standby” mode, the load network still consumes a significant amount of power, in order to keep the channel available and ready for sudden bursts of data to be transmitted without signal distortion. The same goes for the base stations, which are constantly waiting for those bursts of incoming data.
This current implementation of such a communications system wastes both battery capacity for phones, and electricity for network base stations.
Beginning of Eta Devices
improvements of +23% for HSUPA protocol, and +24.2% for WLAN 802.11g protocol, while maintaining high system linearity.
In 2009, a group of MIT professionals, led by David Perreault and Joel Dawson, presented a paper at the IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium which proposes an Asymmetric Multilevel Outphasing (AMO) Architecture for Multi-standard transmitters. The proposed architecture allows for the PA to select the appropriate voltage level based on envelope distribution of the modulated signal. The 2009 paper presented efficiency improvements of +23% for HSUPA protocol, and +24.2% for WLAN 802.11g protocol, while maintaining high system linearity.
The team has developed this technology much further with help from the Deshpande Center grant in 2009. A few years ago, Eta Devices was launched as a full blown company, and is now prepared to push out their new technology for use with smartphones.
The great things Eta is bringing to the table
According to the company’s chief technology officer, Joel Dawson, the developed device can be seen a “high-speed gearbox, that every few nanoseconds, modulates the amount of power that the power amplifier draws from the battery.”
Ultimately, their module is capable of halving the power drain of a standard smartphone PA.
Their technology was tested with a 4G LTE network, and is dubbed as the first transmitter to ever achieve average efficiencies >70%. Ultimately, their module is capable of halving the power drain of a standard smartphone PA.
reduced power wastage by base stations can be seen as equivalently removing 7 Million cars from the roads.
Aside from offering a huge solution to high power consumption of phones, this technology will be able to reduce base station networks’ utility costs by as much as $18 Billion. From another perspective, according to Eta Devices, this reduced power wastage by base stations can be seen as equivalently removing 7 Million cars from the roads.
Eta Devices has been named the 2015 Technology Pioneer for this astounding development.
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