Beating battery drain
Stream video on your smartphone, or use its GPS for an hour or two, and you’ll probably see the battery drain significantly. As data rates climb and smartphones adopt more power-hungry features, battery life has become a concern. Now a technology developed by MIT spinout Eta Devices could help a phone’s battery last perhaps twice as long, and help to conserve energy in cell towers. The primary culprit in smartphone battery drain is an inefficient power amplifier, a component that is designed to push the radio signal out through the phones’ antennas. Similar larger modules are found in wireless base stations, where they might use 10 or even 100 times the power. Prepared to send sizeable chunks of data at any given time, the amplifiers stay at maximum voltage, eating away power — more than any other smartphone component, and about 75 percent of electricity consumption in base stations — and wasting more...