Cellphones Face Power Failure

Microchips have been getting denser according to “Moore’s law”, which holds that the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years.

Yrjoe Neuvo, chief technology officer of Finnish cellphone giant Nokia, predicts that battery capacity will have to rise by 10% a year to support the ever-increasing number of features available on mobile phones, often called “feature creep”.

In Japan, there are phones that are incapable of delivering advertised features because their batteries are not powerful enough, says Isidor Buchmann, founder of Cadex Electronics in Vancouver, Canada.

To get more power out of a battery, more charge has to flow. To do that, battery makers must either get more lithium ions migrating or make those that do move faster,

But more ions means a bigger battery, and mobile phones are shrinking. Battery scientists are experimenting with alternatives to the carbon matrix and cobalt oxide to speed up ion migration, but no one is expecting a dramatic increase even if they are successful.