from February 2004 ABT

meeting report

Portable Power Conference and Expo

San Francisco, CA USA

September 21-23, 2003

The Portable Power Conference and Expo was produced by IDG (www.idgworldexpo.com) and TIAX (www.tiax.biz) to bring together people who collectively determine power solutions used in portable products, including battery manufacturers, fuel cell developers, power conversion devices, power management semiconductors, and the portable device OEMís power specialists. The conference consisted of presentations, panel discussions, and a vendor exhibition area. In addition, lunches and evening cocktail receptions provided an opportunity to see the exhibits, meet colleagues, talk to presenters, and make new contacts. The conference was host to about 300 attendees and 25 exhibitors.

Several pre-conference tutorials covered a range of topics: Advanced Power Source Technology Update, Smart Batteries, Advanced Capacitors, and Ergonomic Product Design for PDAs and Wireless Handsets.

The main conference featured a presentation on wireless dataís ability to drive growth in handsets by Donna Dubinsky, founder and CEO of Handspring Corp. Acer President J. T. Wang, spoke on separating the OEM and branded business in portable computers, and Panasonicís CTO, Dr. Paul Liao, spoke on design trends in consumer electronic products and their influence on power. Intelís Kamal Shah shared details of programs he is working on, including his chairing of the Mobile PC Extended Battery Life Working Group (www.eblwg.com). Topics covered during the balance of the conference can be grouped into several headings: status of the rechargeable battery business, highlights of battery R&D, new developments in small fuel cells, power management trends, and portable product development news with emphasis on portable computers, cell phones and PDAs.

Status of the Rechargeable Battery Business

As Hideo Takeshita, vice president of the Institute of Information Technology, presented extensive data on the rechargeable battery business, including sales by chemistry, size, manufacturer, application, and price, a couple of key points emerged &emdash; Li-ion has become the battery of choice in portable computers and cellphones, displacing NiMH. This trend is apparently continuing in digital audio, video and PDAs. The power tool market is the one exception. NiCd still very much dominates there.

With regard to company leadership, Sanyo has the top market share followed closely by Sony. These two leaders are separated by a sizeable gap from followers MBI, SDI, BYD, and LG Chemical. The average cell price is $3.50, but there is still concern on pricing being soft with Chinese companies still dropping prices as they try to get traction in the marketplace. From the OEM standpoint, the major battery users are Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony, Dell and H-P. The major applications are notebooks and phones. Digital video, audio and PDAs represent the next largest device grouping. The battery industry sees the best opportunity for major growth coming from an entirely different sector than portable products &emdash; transportation. Motor-assisted bicycles, electric scooters and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) may offer the rechargeable battery industry a whole new sector to develop. Toyota is developing Li-ion batteries internally, and Sanyo is heavily involved with NiMH for HEVs.

In factoring the direction of the battery business, several salient forces must be considered. Japan-based companies dominate the rechargeable industry, U.S.-based companies dominate the primary business, Li-ion technology will be viable for a very long time to come because no real alternatives are on the horizon, many large consumer electronic companies are vertically integrated in battery technology, Chinese manufacturing seems to offer the least cost globally for mature battery products, and a solution to long runtime for portable devices still remains elusive.

Cell and Battery R&D

Li-ion energy density has shown a two-time improvement in the past decade, enabling some dramatic developments in portable products. However, we are at the end of that cycle, and chances for significant improvements in energy density are not being contemplated. Instead, incremental improvement, with 450Wh/liter, is a future target. Besides energy density, research efforts are focusing on cost, improved safety, and attributes needed for new applications, such as HEVs (e.g., high charge rate acceptance).

Energy density improvements rely on being able to implement new materials like LiFePO4 and LiNiMnCoO2 for cathodes, and Sn-coated carbon and Si-based materials for anodes. The use of modeling is growing as a tool to accelerate product development, e.g., thermal analysis and microkinetics.

Product reports by a number of Li-ion manufacturers show that Li-polymer performance is the same as Li-ion and, in fact, may have better capacity retention at high temperatures and much less thickness change as a function of cycling, state of charge or number of cycles. Thermal problems in portable computers are a major challenge for battery life because cells in battery packs suffer permanent degradation when exposed to high temperatures.

Developments in Small Fuel Cells

Narrow prospects for energy density improvement in batteries and the seemingly insatiable power demand in portable products continues to drive interest in small fuel cells. The conference brought first-time information from two companies that have been quiet on technical developments to date &emdash; Neah Power Systems and Ultracell Inc. &emdash; while updates to previously reported efforts were given by Motorola Labs and MTI Microfuel Cells.

Neah Power Systemsí CEO Dave Dorheim (www.neahpower.com) outlined the differentiating elements of Neahís small fuel cell technology program &emdash; a three-dimensional 400 micron thick, porous silicon electrode, flowing electrolyte, and on-board oxidant, hydrogen peroxide. The 3-D porous Si is expected to provide more active catalyst sites than typical carbon-based membranes. In addition, flowing electrolyte (as opposed to having it static) eliminates the methanol crossover problem. Carrying the oxidant onboard gives up the weight savings of using oxygen from the air, but the resulting closed system eliminates the very troublesome water management problem, and confers the battery-like advantage of being able to operate in all kinds of environments without concern about contaminants, whether air-borne or liquid. With this approach, Neah believes they can still get a two-to-three-time improvement over standard Li-ion battery runtime. The company recently received a $2 million Advanced Technology Program (ATP) award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The technical strategy for small fuel cell development at Ultracell, Inc. was explained by CEO James Kaschmitter. Fuel reforming is the design path and MEMs is the enabling technology. Ultracellís assessment is that unlocking the high energy density of methanol (MeOH) by converting it to hydrogen via steam reforming avoids the major problems of direct methanol, such as crossover, water management, low efficiency. They believe that the technical problems they face with steam reforming of methanol (e.g., CO generation, high temperatures, expensive catalyst costs) have a much better chance of being resolved. Ultracellís strategy is to press MEMs technology and silicon fabrication to make a fuel processor chip that can deliver high purity hydrogen to conventional fuel cells at low cost and high efficiency. The core technology comes through Ultracellís exclusive license arrangement with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

Alan Soucy, COO of MTI MicroFuel Cells, provided an update on their commercialization efforts, including their partnership with Gillette to develop fuel cartridges and a working arrangement with Intermec on power for portable devices. MTI is pursuing a direct methanol fuel cell.

Motorola Labs has been examining both reformed and direct methanol fuel cells. They have built working models of both in an effort to get a practical handle on the advantages and problems associated with each approach and continue to report on the status of their work at various trade conferences.

BIC Corp. is looking at how to leverage its mature network for fuel cell opportunities. They say that consumersí main experience with fuel cells will be through interaction with the replacement cartridge. They feel they can bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise to this aspect of consumer fuel cell commercialization.

Power Management

What makes power management difficult is that most piecemeal solutions have been applied and now a top-down holistic design approach that incorporates power management in the architecture of the device is necessary. There is opportunity for improvement but also significant difficulty in executing the full array of options. These include processors designed specifically for optimal energy use, dynamic voltage and frequency management, reducing the number of voltages in the system to a minimum, integrated synchronous buck regulators, lowest voltage devices available, shutting down circuits not being used, smart batteries with accurate fuel gauging and low power displays. A breakdown of energy usage shows that 33% goes to the display (with 75% of that backlighting), 10% to the CPU and 10% to the power supply. The PC Extended Battery Life Working Group, started in October 2002 (www.eblwg.org), has four focus areas: usage model research, suppliersí recommendations, alternative power and power management.

Portable Product Developments

Traveling with a portable computer is great. All of your files are at your disposal, you have the ability to do all of your regular work and communicate via email while away from the office. However, the portable falls short when you are traveling and need to access one piece of information quickly and the computer is closed or in your briefcase. Putting a second very small screen on the lid of the computer or providing a wireless connection to the portable with a PDA device is a feature being explored to overcome this deficiency.

With all the interest in wireless connections, developers are asking how useful will wireless be if you canít also cut the wire to AC power.

Intersil is the main supplier of WiFi chipsets. Mobile Internet use for most of the world is below 10% of users, but in Korea and Japan the number is about 80%.

Postage-stamp-size SD cards are becoming the flash memory de facto standard. Introduced at 64MB, next year they will be at 1 Gigabyte with a theoretical 16GB potential and 160MB/sec transfer speed.

How Users Really Feel About Todayís Power Sources, a 60-page marketing study by Bob Altabet (Raltabet@cs.com), offers a peek into portable computer ownersí usage. Some facts from the study to think about &emdash; a portable computer is run on batteries 19% of the time, 20% of users own an extra battery, 46% do not know what kind of battery they have, 29% are dissatisfied with runtime. You can draw your own conclusions.

[Editorís Note: Dennis Sieminski (dennissieminski@msn.com), a frequent meeting reporter for ABT, has relocated from Atlanta, where he had worked for AER Energy Resources, to southern California, where he now is in international sales for Noran Engineering.]