Lack of Battery Power(excerpt from:The journey of a thousand bytes ends with cash crunch)

Source:Dow Jones via Economic Times
Publication date: 26-Jan -2003
 

The economic downturn sapped investment, and now a lack of funds threatens the industry’s chances of overcoming its looming technical obstacles.

That could in turn hold back potential breakthroughs that could spur productivity improvements in the wider economy. 

Dr Martin Campbell-Kelly, a reader in computing history at the University of Warwick, compares the current period to a similar downturn in the early 1970s after a stock-market boom in the late 1960s.

The IT industry “took about 10 years to recover,” he says. “You get less innovation in these situations as a lot of software evolves from thousands of small companies fighting it out and if these companies aren’t being formed you lose that.” 

Yet the IT industry needs to hurdle the barriers blocking it from making Internet access available to everyone at any time. For instance, semiconductor companies are now rubbing up against some of the fundamental laws of physics in their bid to make chips ever smaller, cheaper and more powerful. 

And the sweeping push to free computer technology of its wires also is beginning to falter because of inadequate batteries. Here is a rundown of five of the biggest hurdles faced by the technology industry. 

Lack of Battery Power: The latest mobile phones can do everything from playing arcade games to displaying video clips — but not for very long. Running multimedia files, illuminating colour screens,maintaining high-speed wireless connections and many of the other fancy functions on the latest handsets rapidly drain batteries.

Laptop and handheld computers have similar problems and experts regard short battery life as a severe obstacle to the technology industry’s drive to create portable, yet powerful, gizmos that people can use anyplace and at any time. While the processing speed of mobile phones and laptops has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past decade, battery performance has improved by only about 10% a year.

“Battery development and the word `fast’ do not go well together,”  says Derek Wentz, a spokesman for Sanyo Electric Co of Japan, one of the world’s largest suppliers of handset batteries. 
 
The energy density in today’s lithium-ion batteries, the power source used by the newest mobile phones and portable computers, is approaching its theoretical limit, says Yoshimi Kubo, senior research manager at another Japan-based battery maker, NEC Corp. Sanyo and NEC both are now scratching around for new technologies to replace lithium ion. 
 
One often-mentioned candidate is fuel cells that generate power through a chemical reaction. NEC hopes to begin selling fuel cells,  which will be able to run for 10 times as long as today’s batteries, for portable devices by 2005 — but would first need a technical breakthrough to meet that timetable, Mr. Kubo said. Sanyo is more cautious; Mr Wentz says it still isn’t clear whether such cells, which periodically have to be topped up with chemicals, can be used in mobile phones because of safety and reliability issues. 
 
The semiconductor industry is attacking the problem from another angle. Intel Corp, Texas Instruments Inc, ARM Holdings PLC and other chip designers are developing microprocessors and digital signal processors —- the chips that control computers and mobile phones — that can quickly shut down circuits that aren’t in use and so are more frugal with electricity. 
 
Limits of Moore’s Law: The dazzling progress of the semiconductor sector — and the broader technology industry — over the past 40 years is thanks to a phenomenon known as Moore’s Law. Based on an observation made in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, the law holds that semiconductor makers will be able to double the processing power of a standard chip every one to two years by squeezing in more and more circuits. But now the circuits have shrunk to a point where further miniaturisation is becoming nigh on impossible 
 
Although Alan Brown, an analyst with research firm Gartner Inc in London, expects Moore’s Law to hold for the next five to seven years, he says ultimately circuit size must be limited by the size of individual atoms. “It was never a law, just an observation,” he says of Mr Moore’s dictum. 
 
Juri Matisoo, vice president of technology programmes at the Semiconductor Industry Association in California, agrees the industry is approaching a watershed, noting that as circuits shrink it becomes increasingly difficult to print them onto the chips. Mr Matisoo also says the insulating material around the circuits is becoming so narrow that electricity can easily escape. To compensate for the leakage, the chips suck in more power, draining the batteries in portable devices at a rapid clip.

Although the semiconductor industry is devising new printing techniques and materials less prone to leakage, both Mr Matisoo and Mr Brown say these technologies are still unproven. Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor maker, recently warned that power leakage, in particular, looks like a major long-term problem. 
 

Links:
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