Smart power saving technology for mobile phones and base stations
The start-up Eta Devices will resolve long-standing problems of efficiency in RFID.
To operate all mobile base stations of the planet covered in this year, experts estimated that electricity costs in the amount of 28 billion euros. This represents less than one percent of the now global electricity production. One reason: The built-in hardware devices works surprisingly inefficient. Especially the power amplifiers require more power than is necessary.
Its counterpart in the mobile phones, which sits in the radio unit, suffers from similar problems. Who sends large files or videos viewed knows that already: The smartphone is warm and the battery drains very quickly. The power amplifiers in base stations and mobile phones waste experts say more than 65 percent of the absorbed energy - one reason why some long-time users need to charge your device twice a day.
The MIT spinoff Eta Devices of Cambridge, which was founded by two electrical engineering professors of the university, claims to have solved the efficiency problem now with a new electronic switch. Currently, the process of Joel Dawson and David Perreault is in the laboratory, but it should be commercialized yet 2013 - first incorporated into LTE base stations. GW is an approximately half the energy consumption. A chip version that is being developed in parallel, could double the battery life in smartphones so.
"In this area, there has been little significant progress for many years," said Vanu Bose of wireless start-up Vanu. "If you can reach an efficiency of 30 to 35 percent at current amplifier elements, one is set up right."
Power amplifiers use transistors that consume energy in both the radio and in the standby mode. The efficiency can be increased only by the standby power consumption is reduced. But rapid performance increases are bad for the signal quality. For this reason, the standby also consumes a lot of electricity, which wastes energy.
"This means that one takes a lot of power, just to keep this thing in operation," says Dawson. And the more data you send, the worse it gets ". With high data rates requires significantly more energy in standby mode as transmission energy Therefore, the device may feel warm."
Eta Devices wants to solve the problem over a high-speed electronic switch, a kind of high-speed transmission of electricity. The system selects between the different voltages, which are provided to the transistor unit, and then uses the power level that minimizes the power consumption. The adjustment will be made up to 20 million times per second. The company calls the technology "Asymmetric multilevel outphasing" AMO short.
The process not only helps in transfers, but also in receiving. In this situation, the power amplifier is busy receiving mail packages - or to request fresh packages should, in the data stream which is missing. "The channel is very active, even if you download only a YouTube video. Many users do not even know it." However, would only help the network more relevant to the type of data, so that such acknowledgments are no longer necessary.
Eta Devices has now collected $ 6,000,000 from Ray Stata, co-founder of the electronic specialists Analog Devices. Is also involved in the venture capital firm. An official presentation of AMO is scheduled for February next year at the Mobile World Congress. Initially intends to focus on developing countries, where many base stations are still using diesel generators. $ 15 billion in fuel costs are currently estimated to come together here every year.
Even more interesting is the smartphone market. There, it is hoped in the future to offer a single-chip power amplifier, which covers all important frequency bands of CDMA, GSM and LTE networks.
The market for base stations but remains important. In addition to the 67 percent of energy used by the power amplifier draws another 11 percent go on it for cooling. The Eta devices hardware could halve the power consumption thus, as CEO Mattias Astrom says. In connection with the expansion of LTE in the coming years, each year more than a million new cells are formed.
Indirect savings could be achieved also in cooling and in emergency generators, which could then be smaller. "There are a number of secondary effects," say Astrom, whose last company, the card service C3, was sold to Apple. "We are extremely confident that we have something here."
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