The invention of the mobile phone is one of the biggest blessings to our world, but always having to charge our phone’s battery is also one of the biggest challenges we all face. If you are living in a developed country, the challenge isn’t a big deal as there is always constant power supply; however, if you are living in a developing country, with erratic power supply, the challenge is a real big deal.
But there is a good news if you are living in a country with erratic power supply: you may not need to charge your future phones. Some brilliant guys are already developing a battery-less phone. A phone that doesn’t require the use of a battery to work.
Instead, the battery-less phone (actually called battery-free phone by the maker) would generate its own power by extracting microwatts of power from ambient radio signals and/or light.
Speaking to Digital Trends about the phone, Vamsi Talla (a former UW electrical engineering doctoral student and Allen School research associate leading the development of the phone) said the reason they chose to build a battery-free phone was to solve the problem whereby people experience having a dead phone at the wrong time when they need to make important calls.
The battery-less phone uses photodiodes to generate power
While explaining how the battery-less phone works, Talla said the phone uses analog voice encoding, which consumes less energy, as opposed to the widely used digital voice encoding, which consumes more energy. And to make the phone able to extract energy from ambient radio signals and light, it has a tiny solar panel called photodiodes inside.
At present, the phone is still at the prototype, printed circuit board stage, but Talla said he and his team are thinking about two directions to take the prototype to.
They would either turn the prototype into a sort of bare-bone phones, which people that live in areas without good power supply can buy and use. Or they would sell the technology to big smartphone makers (like iPhone and Samsung), who can then integrate the technology in their phones.
He concluded that they are also planning to build on the prototype of the battery-less phone, and their goal, in the end, is to make a full functional battery-less smartphone, which would use low-power display technology used in Kindle e-readers and low-power cameras.
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