Extended Battery Life For Portable Devices Through PCM

Does your cell phone get discharged way too fast? Do the applications use up the battery too soon? Well, not to worry because the engineers from the University of Illinos have come up with a novel technique which will give your charged battery a larger life span.


Image Credit: sciencedaily.com

They have developed a form of ultra low power digital memory for the mobile phones. This technology not only utilizes 100 times less energy than the similar available memory but also is much faster. This will definitely help the portable devices which use battery for their operation to work for longer hours and require less frequent charging.

This image is a schematic of four bits in various on/off states. The bit is made up of phase-change material with a size of about 10 nanometers with carbon nanotube electrodes. The programming current is 100 times lower than the present state-of-the-art memory. (Credit: Eric Pop, University of Illinois)

Affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois, Professor Eric Pop led the team.  He stated, “I think anyone who is dealing with a lot of chargers and plugging things in every night can relate to wanting a cell phone or laptop whose batteries can last for weeks or months.” I would vouch for it.  Definitely, everybody who uses a battery operated device wants a long lasting life for it.

The present technology of flash memory used in portable devices however, requires high programming voltages as they store bits as charge and therefore, they are slow too.  Phase change materials (PCMs) are an alternative. A bit is stored in the resistance of a material in PCM and it is switchable too. They are non-volatile data storage materials and can be used for reconfigurable electronics. The only problem was the high programming currents which posed a problem to realize low power operation. The engineers concentrated on the size factor and controlled PCM bits with single-wall and small-diameter multi-wall carbon nanotubes. This configuration helped them achieve currents as low as 0.5 ?A (SET) and 5 ?A (RESET).   This was achieved by using carbon nanotubes which were only a few nanometers in diameter instead of using industry standard metal wires. These nanotubes were 10,000 times smaller than a human hair.  Pop said, “Carbon nanotubes are the smallest known electronic conductors. They are better than any metal at delivering a little jolt of electricity to zap the PCM bit. Albert Liao, a graduate student and co-author said, "Anytime you're running an app, or storing MP3s, or streaming videos, it's draining the battery. The memory and the processor are working hard retrieving data. As people use their phones to place calls less and use them for computing more, improving the data storage and retrieval operations are important."

This technology can be utilized in all the present iphones, laptops and other portable devices making them extremely energy efficient. This in turn will help us save energy and reduce the carbon count. Earth! It’s time to get greener.