Toshiba boffins claim battery life boost with SRAM tweaks

Japanese electronics giant Toshiba claims to have found a technology solution to the perennial problem of mobile device battery life, offering a reduction in standby power consumption of up to 85 per cent. Announced at the 2013 International Solid-State Circuit Conference in San Francisco last week, the innovation in embedded …

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, back in the distant past

I was designing (as it happens, Toshiba) SRAM into battery-powered handheld mobile computers over 30 years ago, and was able to get the standby power consumption of the devices down to a few microamps by doing nothing more than reducing the RAM voltage and turning everything else off. But then, 2KB was a lot of memory back in those days...

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, yeah, yeah

Toshiba's been making wild claims about battery breakthroughs how long? At least for the last 10 years, if I remember correctly. Meanwhile... nothing's changed.

p.s. in standby mode

p.p.s. "UP TO 80%", read: "on average 10% in real life conditions".

[James Micallef]

Re: yeah, yeah, yeah

"Meanwhile... nothing's changed"

Battery life HAS improved tremendously, BUT phone designers keep using up any gains made on bigger / brighter screens and thinner handsets, and application designers eat up the rest with always-on connections, unneeded use of GPS et etc

As a result we have batteries that could power my old Nokia 3310 for probably around 6 months, but can't power my new HTC for 24 hours

[John Smith 19]

CMOS SRAM has always done rather well on standby power needs

Microamps rather than milliamps.

Density not so good.

Good to see people still working on this.

[James 51]

Reducing the power needed is a better solution than providing more power but want to see this in action.

[Silverburn]

how much power the system will need by using replicated bit lines to monitor the frequency of the ring oscillator, and minimises the active power of SRAM

Whooosh!

<-- icon is for me.

[ilmari]

Standby times are pretty good as is, power consumption is on the order of 5mA in standby, including 3g standby. This gives you a standby battery life of over a week.. Improving that to 2 weeks or 4 weeks with same battery sounds fantastic, but...

The issue is that the amount of time our devices spend in standby is very low. There's stuff constantly updating in the background for no good reason, and the controls available to the user is poor.. Every widget and app seems to think they're special, that they can ignore being a good citizen because the user installed it they must have the right and obligation to constantly update their UI, data and what not, even if user hasn't used or looked at it all day..

Even if standby power use could be reduced to 0, we'd still not get more than the day or two of battery life..