Improved Battery Life

Improving battery life is going to have HUGE benefits for mobile devices. If this is what it's cracked up to be, it's just another thing improving the ecosystem for PicoP.

Thanks for the heads-up Joe.

Treehugger.com

If your phone's battery life is the bane of your existence, then this is for you. Engineers at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), led by Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Ruyan Guo, have developed a chip that can extend the battery life of almost any gadget.

The tiny chip is only the size of a pinhead, but its potential is great. The chip can make lower power electronics like smartphones work much more efficiently, cutting back on the number of times you have to plug in and slashing the energy consumption of the electronics in our lives.

"This chip can be used with anything that runs on a battery," said UTSA researcher Shuza Binzaid. "It manages power so that the device can last longer."

When people want to extend the life of their phone's battery, usually that means switching it into low power mode which turns off many of the phone's functions in order to preserve the battery charge. With the chip, the same power sipping mode could be achieved while the phone was running at full functionality.