Many of today’s smartphones are coming with high end specs including fast processors. But a CPU of course can’t be too fast because of heating issues, unless there is a better cooling system available. DARPA’s micro vacuum pumps could eventually be the answer.

Via DARPA’s Chip-Scale Vacuum Micro Pumps (CSVMP) program, researchers from the University of Michigan, MIT, and Honeywell International have developed microscale vacuum pumps, intended for use in highly sensitive gas analyzers that detect biological and chemical attacks, and microscopic atomic clocks.

The pump that you see above is from the University of Michigan. It has an array of tiny hexagonal compartments to which smaller channels are connected for high suction.

Seen above is the two-stage pump that has been developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The pump has curved surfaces which allow large volumes of gas to be displaced.

The pump from Honeywell International is similar in design to a turbine, but in reverse. Those blades that you see above, each of which is apparently half the size of a dot at the end of this sentence, push gas outward to create a vacuum in the center.

Andrei Shkel, DARPA program manager, says, “There have never been ionic or mechanical gas pumps at the microscale before. The CSVMP program has demonstrated both and more. The smallest commercially available pumps are the size of a deck of cards, which dwarf the vacuum electronics and sensors we want to attach our pumps to. These pumps are not only 300 times smaller than off-the-shelf pumps and 20 times smaller than custom-built pumps, but they also consume approximately 10 times less power to evacuate from atmospheric pressure to milliTorr pressures”.

In the not too distant future we might see mobile phones and other electronic devices arriving with high-performance processors which could be cooled by microscopic scale vacuums.

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Kang Shin, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of Michigan along with Xinyu Zhang, a doctoral student will be presenting their new power management strategy on September 21 at the ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking in Las Vegas. The strategy is not yet available commercially because it is still in the proof-of-concept stage.

According to Shin, even if smartphones are in power-saving modes, they are still on alert searching for clear communication channels and awaiting incoming information. They have discovered that this type of energy-taxing (known as “idle listening”) can occur within a huge amount of time cell phones spend in power-saving mode. On busy networks, this translates to around 80 percent.

The new approach to saving battery life is called the E-MiLi, which stands for energy-Minimizing Idle Listening. Shin and Zhang state that this could make smartphones perform idle listening in a more efficient manner.

Researchers have conducted an extensive trace-based analysis of real Wi-Fi networks to learn how much time a phone can spend in keeping a part of it active. In the end, Shin and Zhang discovered that devices in power-saving modes consume around 60-80 percent of their time in idle listening, and this depends on the amount of traffic in the carrier or network. They also stated that phones which are active and those which are in power-saving mode roughly use the same amount of battery power. Now, that’s one mind-boggling piece of information!

Are you curious about how E-MiLi works? First, it slows down the Wi-Fi clock by up to 1/16 of its normal frequency, but once the phone notices incoming information, it gets back to its normal frequency. Shin emphasized that it is well-known that people can slow a device’s clock in order to save energy, but the difficult part is to get the smartphone to recognize incoming messages while it is in the slower mode.

Shin explained that messages come with a header, and that phones could be enabled to detect these headers. This way, the gadget will be able to recognize the message coming in even if it is set in the subconscious mode. In addition to this, the researchers found out that the E-MiLi, when used with the power-saving mode, can reduce energy consumption by approximately 44 percent for 92 percent of the mobile devices when it comes to the wireless networks.

The E-MiLi is compatible with the recent phone models, so you can use it on your smartphone to boost up your battery’s life.

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At some point in your life, you may have replaced your old cell phone because its battery didn’t last long, leaving you empty whenever you needed to use your phone the most. Well, U.S. scientists revealed some crucial information that may help batteries last longer.

Scientists from the University of Michigan said that mobile phones that are in power-saving mode and not actively sending or receiving files or messages still use battery power for searching communication channels and anticipating incoming information. This is vital information that cell phone companies do not tell their subscribers.

According to the researchers, a new “subconscious mode” for phones and other Wi-Fi enabled mobile units can help extend the life of the battery by 54 per cent. They also added that phones in idle mode spend almost the same amount of power as when they are active. Professor Kang Shin, a UM computer science and engineering mentor, and doctoral student Xinyu Zhang further expounded that the new power-management technique can make cell phones perform idle listening more efficiently.

Energy-minimizing Idle Listening strategy slows down the Wi-Fi hardware clock by 1/16 of the normal frequency, but it gets back to full speed when the cell phone notices information coming into it. Shin stressed out that the challenge in this is how to get the phone in recognizing incoming messages while it is in slower mode.

“We came up with a clever idea,” Shin said. “Usually, messages come with a header, and we thought the phone could be enabled to detect this, as you can recognize that someone is calling your name even if you’re 90 percent asleep.”

No word on when exactly we could see this on the market.

The post Researchers Find Way to Extend Battery Life appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The antenna is usually the largest wireless component in a cellphone, unless you own a smartphone. Then it’s the screen. While no one wants a smaller screen, shrinking the phone’s antenna could pave the way for even smaller phones and consumer electronics, according to engineering researchers at the University of Michigan. They’ve managed to produce a significantly smaller antenna that has the potential to be mass produced.

Just how much smaller is the antenna? Well, it’s about ten times smaller than the norm. The hemisphere-shaped antenna is currently 70 percent efficient and operates at 1.5 gigahertz, which is in the frequency range of WiFi devices as well as cordless and mobile phones. Even better, it can be made faster and cheaper with imprint processing techniques.

“It can be used to fabricate antennas that are of a wide variety of sizes, shapes, frequencies, and designs,” said Carl Pfeiffer, a doctoral student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and first author of a paper on the work. “Basically if you tell me the data rate that is required for a particular application, I can make an antenna that does this while at the same time being as small as possible.”

We’ll see how soon they can get this on the market, as it will surely add fuel to the Apple vs. Android smartphone war, as all companies continue to scramble to come up with the smallest/thinnest smartphone using this new technology.

Photo: Carl Pfeiffer from University of Michigan.

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