Conserving power on 4G Phones

While we can see that the technology in mobile phones have advanced significantly, its still lagging on the battery front and there is no 'Duracell' solution for phones yet.

There is a cambridge (UK) based company called Nujira that is working on doubling the battery life for 4G phones. Here is an extract from Electronics weeely:

Nujira originally designed its RF power modulation technology to increase the efficiency of 650W power amplifiers in 3G mobile basestations. It is now working on a lower power version which should reduce cost and improve power efficiency in next generation 3G LTE (long term evolution) mobile phones.

According to Haynes, the company’s technology, known as HAT (high accuracy tracking), could more than double the time between charges for next generation mobile phones.

After a period when handset battery life has steadily increased with more power efficient designs, the situation could be reversed with the next generation of 3G LTE multimedia handsets.

According to Haynes, there are as many as 14 frequency bands - ten FDD frequency bands and four different TDD frequency bands - defined in 3GPP that can be used for LTE, and it is likely that more bands will be added to this list such as 700MHz in the US.

As current power amplifiers (PAs) can only efficiently cover one or two bands a large number of amplifiers will be needed in a multi-band 4G handset. “Already 3G handsets can have as many as five power amplifiers,” said Haynes.

“So a cost effective wide-band RF power amplifier is a key enabling technology for the creation of 4G handsets and our technology will make it possible to replace five or six narrow-band PAs with just one or two wide-band power amplifiers,” said Haynes.

The technology has already been proven in the basestation market where Haynes said the company has contracts with 10 basestation OEMs. For basestations Nujira has designed a high efficiency, high power DC-DC converter module.

For the handset market, which is potentially much higher volume, Haynes said the company will look at an IP (intellectual property) approach which will see its technology designed into more integrated silicon designs.
Haynes also said the company was developing a version of the power modulator for use in DVB digital broadcast transmitters.

Haynes expects to have its IP-based power modulator for handsets on the market by Mobile World Congress next February.