A team of researchers in Singapore found a way to make smartphones batteries last almost forever?
Smartphones improved our lives in countless ways since their introduction. However, their numerous functions created a new concern for users: the life of the battery. Some of the causes of rapid energy depletion in smartphones include the processor, the length of screen activity, and, more importantly, the exchange of data. Indeed, the beauty of having a smartphone is that it can perform some of the tasks that were reserved for computers, such as data transfer. Smartphones can send to or receive data from another smartphone or cloud storage, and in that process, the devices tend to use a lot of their battery power. While every smartphone company is working to improve its battery life, a team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) is working on a different solution.
While improving the battery power is definitely a viable solution, it does not solve the issue of overconsumption of energy during certain processes. This is the part of the problem that researchers of the NUS found a solution. They discovered that when the quality of the data being exchange is reduced, the process of data transfer consumes less energy. So, they set out to create a technique that will diminish the quality of the data during the transfer. They created a chip that hosts a network. When used properly, the network-on-chip system reduces the consumption of data by almost 20 percent without degrading the data. Although the results don’t seem drastic, it is important to note that they are a 5-fold improvement over existing solutions. The system works by dynamically adjusting the amplitude of conventional values used in mission-critical tasks to a level that conserves their accuracy while lowering power consumption.
The idea came from observing a slight degradation of a video’s quality when the battery power is at the lowest, for example. The researchers think they could apply their discovery to bigger devices such as desktops and laptops, and maybe even bigger computer systems. The researchers even plan to build a new generation of cameras that would not need to be charged constantly and possibly operate at perpetuity using a battery as small as a centimeter-size solar cell. The researchers have not announced a launch date for their new technology, but we hope it will be sooner rather than later.
It's a claim... but without tangible hardware or testing, could they have just said anything? We shall see...
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