This is the time to secure America’s place at the forefront of electric mobility.

Forty-five is a number to remember. One figure, representing the cost of batteries, is slated to continue its decline as battery adoption accelerates. The other, representing what consumers pay or will pay for electricity, will likely continue to increase.

We hosted at our offices in Milpitas, California, the Autotech Council’s recent meeting on Innovation Review on Battery Tech.

Electric vehicle predictions for 2024

What if Machine Learning were available to scientists of the 19th century?

The rise of electric trucks and the unique design considerations that come with their development.

There are many parallels between the battery and semiconductor industries, and, thus, lessons to be learned for the future. Incumbent lithium-ion battery manufacturers are scaling manufacturing at an unprecedented pace. In 2023, software will increasingly become the key to advance the state of the battery...

LFP batteries are attractive for a number of reasons. Yet in return for these benefits, they suffer from lower energy density, approximately half to two-thirds that of NMC- or NCA-based batteries. Energy density is a fundamental property that impacts driving range in electric vehicles.

What's the best way to understand battery behavior? Combine fundamental scientific principles with targeted statistical data analysis.

George Gianarikas, senior research analyst at Baird covering Quantumscape (NYSE: QS), asked the company’s CEO, Jagdeep Singh, on its Q1 2022 earnings call about “the kind of role software analytics play in the offering” that the company will give to OEMs.

Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal writes on 26 February 2022: “In the superheated market for batteries, promising lab development often get overhyped by startups.” He quotes an oft heard phrase: liar, liar, battery supplier. On the day before, Heather Somerville and Eliott Brown, also of the Wall Street Journal, describe “SPAC startups made lofty promises” that “aren’t working out.”

To say 2021 was a busy year would be an understatement. So, it is timely that I return to writing, not to reflect on the past year, but rather to contemplate the trends of the new year. We live in a unique epoch. The tide to electrify everything has turned. Government...

In the 4th quarter of 2020, Hyundai recalled 82,000 electric vehicles globally due to battery fire risks at a cost of nearly a billion dollars. General Motors also recalled 69,000 Bolt EVs for battery fire risks. BMW, too, recalled nearly 27,000 plug-in hybrid EVs...

At a market capitalization exceeding $700 billion, Tesla enjoys a unique financial position among all auto manufacturers to expand its investments in electric vehicles and infrastructure. Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPAC) have taken Fisker, Lordstown...

When it comes to electric vehicles, there is an understanding that the battery is a fundamental component to the vehicle’s utility. Yet, there is also a false expectation that the battery can deliver all what drivers expect from an EV. Often underestimated is the...

A common denominator is the battery’s energy density: it is the amount of electrical energy per unit volume (or per unit weight) that a rechargeable battery can store. Energy is measured in units of kWh. Hence energy density is in units of Wh per liter (Wh/l), or...

Tesla’s market valuation hit today $225 Billion, more than the valuation of any other auto manufacturer, highlighting the importance of the lithium-ion battery to our economies. The battery is the product differentiator for electric vehicles, stationary...

While the current situation has put us all in unfamiliar territory, one bright spot has been the willingness of so many people and organizations to offer advice and assistance. With hundreds of millions of us isolated in our homes, making especially...

Is it true that electric vehicles (EV) need 800-V battery packs for ultrafast charging? Is it true that the Porsche Taycan uses 800-V packs to enable ultrafast charging? Why did GM announce that its new battery platform will support 800 V? Let’s find out. Let’s...

Whether related to the stock market, presidential elections or climate, December is the month to make predictions for the coming year and decade. So what battery trends should we expect for the upcoming 2020-2030 decade? Lithium-ion batteries will power...

I was beaming with delight when I read that John Goodenough, Stanley Wittingham and Akira Yoshino received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the “development of lithium-ion batteries. ”Wittingham’s initial work on batteries dates back to...

New menu settings inside Apple’s iPhones display a warning sign if the device’s battery is not recognized as authentic. Other smartphone manufacturers are curbing users and unauthorized repair shops from replacing the battery. Why it matters: Smartphone...

You are an entrepreneur. You understand that batteries are powering the future. You think present battery technology falls short of market demands. You invented a new battery technology. You may even have some early prototypes that show some exceptional...

Let’s say you love to ride your bicycle and that you want to measure speed without using fancy computers and GPS. What would you do? High-school physics to the rescue! All we need is the circumference of the wheel then count the number of rotations the wheel...

The concept of risk and risk management is not new. In 1688, Edward Lloyd set up what would become today Lloyd’s of London to contain the emerging risks of the new and growing maritime trans-Atlantic trade. Since then, the business world has worked...

Everyone’s excited about 5G. And with good reason. All the great things we have been able to do on our smart phones with 4G LTE will multiply into bigger and better things in the 5G Era. We’ll be able to send and receive huge text and image files in the blink of...

Ted Miller, senior manager of energy storage at Ford Motor Co., recently stated: “We don’t see another way to get there without solid-state technology.” The statement is in regard to more powerful batteries for electric vehicles. Mr. Miller goes on...

Geoffrey Fowler at the Washington Post recently published an article observing that phone battery life is getting worse. I enjoyed my conversations with Geoffrey as he researched the topic. But why is the phone battery life getting worse? Why are batteries not...

The break I took from writing is over. I hope many of the readers took the time to read, re-read and digest the insight I shared in my earlier blogs. My return theme is around battery safety. Since 2016, when the Samsung Note 7 became headline news, there have been...

I googled the question “ should I charge my phone to 100”. Google returned 467 million results. From folks offering opinions on “how to properly charge” to others calling on “science”, there seems no obvious consensus in the media. Yet, unlike views on more...

5G is the evolution of the present LTE wireless network that carriers are beginning to deploy later this year. Yes, it will be a Global network, with every geography around the globe utilizing it at some point in the future. Yes, it will have Great capabilities, from streaming...

If Tesla Motors reduced the power of their flagship Tesla electric vehicles after, say, 50,000 miles of driving, the world would be up in arms. If General Motors throttled the Corvette engine to 4 cylinders after some number of miles, the government...

Congratulations, you just purchased a new Tesla model S electric vehicle (EV). You also committed an extra $2,000 to install a level-2 charger on a wall in your spacious garage. A level-2 charger will deliver 6 kW of power at 240 V to charge your big...

Late summer is the season of new smartphones. Apple, Google, Samsung, LG are only a few names that announce their best ever devices in September. By now, you have all heard of or seen the new iPhones including the iPhone X, the beautiful Galaxy...

We proudly announced today that the new LG flagship smartphone, the LG V30, includes Qnovo’s adaptive charging technology. The V30 uses Qnovo’s QNI solution, our most sophisticated algorithms to manage its lithium-ion battery. In this post, we open...

School started this week for most of us so it is time to resume the posts. Today’s post continues with insight into the subtleties of the lithium-ion battery. It is surprising how a simple device, with only two contacts, can be so intriguing and complex...

Fast charging is a common feature of most modern smartphones. In a few more years, it may become a standard feature for electric vehicles too. Yet, asking a consumer how long it would take to charge their device will most likely result in a confused answer...

Whether you browse the web searching for a teardown of your favorite smartphone, or are sufficiently skilled to take a smartphone apart, you will always find a battery, a lithium-ion battery, with a whole bunch of markings on it. Some of them are obvious to...

T’is the season of new smartphone releases. The Samsung S8 is here and the drums are beating loud ahead of the much anticipated Apple iPhone 8 (or Edition, or whatever they will call it). These devices and their makers clearly tout their performance features: faster...

We, that’s all of us on this planet, buy every year 1.6 billion smartphones. It works out to one new smartphone every year for every four living human beings on this planet. Cumulatively, we own and use 4 billion smartphones around the world. Every region...

MWC 2017 is over. The crowds came and saw ideas and innovations. The media covered and reviewed. Awards were made. Yet a sense of public amnesia seemed to hover over the battery safety problems that the Samsung Note 7 brought to surface in 2016...

Samsung announced this week the results of their investigations regarding the Galaxy Note 7 fires. Samsung hired three independent test laboratories, Exponent, TUV Rheinland and UL to perform the analyses. The result was three full reports and...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of innovation, it was the age of imitation. It was the epoch of the battery, it was the epoch of lithium. It was the season of Japan, it became the season of China. It was the spring of hope for batteries...

This year has been one of heightened awareness regarding battery safety. Smartphone manufacturers now realize that battery fires are real and recalls from the field are enormously expensive. Along with this education comes a deeper realization that battery...

Qualcomm announced this week their 4th generation Quick Charge™ technology to be available in their upcoming Snapdragon 835 chipset. Quick Charge™ 4 continues to build on making fast charging an integral part of modern smartphones and consumer...

For the average reader, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, often abbreviated as EIS, is more than a mouthful. Understanding its utility can be relegated to the category of unresolved mysteries. Today’s post will shed some light and a little intuitive thinking...

State-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries, whether used in smartphones or electric vehicles, all rely on the same fundamental cell structure: two opposing electrodes with an intermediate insulating separator layer, with lithium ions shuffling between the two electrodes...

A recent article published by The Verge attempted to explain the science behind the exploding Samsung Note 7 batteries. The article touches on several important aspects of battery safety but the handwaving did not really talk about much science. So this...

The images of melted Samsung Note 7 smartphones are all over the internet. News of Samsung’s massive recall are headline news. It is embarrassing to Samsung Mobile, its marketing and engineering teams, and most certainly its executives. Consumers are...

Tesla Motors announced today upgraded versions of the Model S and X boasting 100 kWh battery packs, up from 90 kWh used in their earlier top-of-the-line electric vehicles. One hundred kilowatt-hours sounds like a lot, and it is, but I bet that many readers...

As I pondered over the past couple of weeks what might be a befitting topic for this 100th post, a group at MIT announced that they discovered how to make batteries with double the energy. Of course, the operative word in the press release was...

This post includes contributions from Robert Nalesnik. I discussed in the past how fast charging requires two components: i) power delivery – that means getting extra electrical power from the wall socket to the battery and ii) battery management...

Pokemon Go, the app that catapulted over this past weekend to the #1 download spot for both iOS and Android apps simultaneously runs the cellular radio (3G, 4G, LTE) along with the GPS locator and the screen. No wonder users are reporting dead...

Sleep is an essential function of life. Tissue in living creatures regenerate during deep sleep. We, humans, get very cranky with sleep deprivation. And cranky we do get when our battery gets depleted because we did not give our mobile device sufficient...

I will jump ahead in this post to discuss the merits of different lithium-ion chemistries and their suitability to energy storage systems (ESS) applications. Naturally, this assumes that lithium-ion batteries in general are among the best suited technologies...

I explained in this previous post how energy storage can be beneficial in the configuration of a modern electrical grid that encourages multiple forms of clean energy. Today’s post takes this explanation one step further and covers a few of the fundamental...

Since the installation of the first electrical power plant late in the 19th century, the business of supplying electricity to industry and residences has been “on demand.” When you flip a light switch in your home, you expect the light to go on. For this to happen...

Every so often, I hear at a dinner gathering the question: “Is there enough lithium?” I have already covered this question in a previous post. The answer is YES. However, an abundance of a resource in the earth’s crust does not mean that its economics will always...

A young woman, Anna Crail, was flying on 19 March of this year on an Alaska Airlines flight from Seattle to Honolulu. About 90 minutes prior to landing, her iPhone 6 suddenly broke out in flames causing panic in mid flight. The fire was rapidly extinguished by the...

Tesla Motors presold over 400,000 Model 3 electric vehicles (EVs) in the course of a couple of weeks. Should the traditional carmakers with conventional internal combustion engines (ICE) be concerned? …the answer is probably not before 2025 or beyond...

I discussed in a prior post the charging of the 5.5-in Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. In this post, we will look at its sister device, the 5.1-in Samsung Galaxy S7, specifically the US version (model G930) using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chipset, also known...

For a seemingly simple device with only two electrical connections to it, a battery is deceivingly misunderstood by the broad population, especially as batteries are now a common fixture in our technology-laden daily lives. I will highlight in this post five...

The new Galaxy S7 and its sister smartphone the S7 Edge are receiving rave reviews. So let’s take a look at their batteries. A brief comparison table shows the new S7 and S7 Edge side-by-side with the older S6 and the Note 4. Let’s make a few key...

General Motors announced in January the all new Chevy Bolt, and Tesla Motors followed recently in pre-announcing the long anticipated Model 3. Both cars are new and novel, the first electric vehicles ever to boast of a driving range of 200 miles at a price before...

We are very proud to announce today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that the new Sony Xperia devices will incorporate Qnovo’s adaptive charging solutions. Sony Mobile announced today new smartphones offering twice the battery cycle life in addition...

Ask smartphone users about their battery experience and you often get the typical answer: “it sucks!” But why? and what is the problem? iPhones suffer from a small battery capacity, so it is understandable that Apple users get upset with their short battery life...

I described in the earlier post how adaptive systems turned smartphones into great cameras. Let’s now talk about how adaptivity and adaptive charging can make a battery perform far better. Let’s start briefly with the basic operation of a lithium ion battery...

Our new website presents our suite of products called Adaptive Charging Software. It is fair to say that everyone understands and recognizes the meaning of “Charging” and “Software”…but “Adaptive”? What does it really mean? The purpose of this...

A lithium-ion battery cell for a smartphone costs the device OEM somewhere between $2 to $4 depending on its capacity and other design attributes. It constitutes about 1 to 2% of the entire cost of the mobile device. In contrast, a lithium-ion battery for...

The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) proposed today a new set of rules that will govern the operation of autonomous vehicles on the state’s roads. Simultaneously, Google announced...

What do Chappaqua, NY and Brentwood, CA have in common? Burning hoverboards….this is a new category of battery-powered levitating boards, sort of electrically-powered, self-balanced skateboards.

Before I start this post, I encourage all new readers to go back to the early posts if they desire to learn more about the basics of lithium-ion batteries and their operation. This post is dedicated to deciphering...

For those of you old enough to remember the Sony Walkman portable radios in 1970s, they ushered a new era of consumer electronics, and one could argue, the first mobile battery-powered “devices,” the ancestral precursor to the Apple iPod three decades...

The lithium-ion battery market is large. For consumer devices, it will exceed $10B in 2015 corresponding to a total output capacity of 40 GWh. The promise of even greater markets in stationary energy storage and electric vehicles is attracting interest and...

Ah, we could talk for hours about James Bond’s 1964 Aston Martin DB5. Aston Martin remains an iconic luxury brand, one of the last vestiges of British automotive style. So fast forward to 2015, the age of electric cars and Teslas: Aston Martin just announced its...

Pause for a second and wonder why electric vehicles have frustratingly limited driving ranges? or why your smartphone lasts only for a few limited hours instead of an entire month? Yet, a good ol’ combustion-engine car can go for hundreds of miles without a...

There were several releases in the last day covering fast charging, and in particular, Qualcomm’s evolution of its power delivery mechanism called Quick Charge 3.0. This is quite exciting because it elevates the power delivery — i.e., the circuitry that delivers the...

One of the serious consequences of fast charging lithium-ion batteries is the formation of lithium metal on the surface of the anode (the negative electrode when the battery is being charged). While the battery industry has invested significant effort to ensure...

Not yours, of course….the smartphone’s waist. We see a race among the smartphone makers to go thin. The iPhone 6 Plus is 6.9 mm thick and it is already been outflanked by some new devices coming from China. In particular, the Oppo R5 boasts a thickness...

Elon Musks’ Gigafactory comes on line in 2017 to build some 35 GWh annually worth of batteries for Tesla. Thirty-five giga….that sounds like a big number. But wait, thirty-five gigabytes is a small capacity for your disk drive. So let’s put things in perspective...

A statement of this devilish nature during the middle ages would have earned its author a burning at the stake. The mere notion of a “battery” would have probably been in the realm of druids and witches, and reviving anything dead would have been…well...

One of the most recognizable electric vehicles on the road, the Nissan Leaf, has a battery capacity of 24 kWh. It has a rated driving range of nearly 80 miles, about ⅓ that of the Tesla Model S. It is therefore not surprising that its battery capacity is also nearly...

That is 3,000 mAh….this is the battery capacity that consumers will see in most mid-tier to high-end mobile smartphones for the foreseeable future. Why? It’s simple, this is the capacity that gives consumers an honest full day of operation. This begs a...

Kevin Gibb of TechInsights published recently an article in EE Times that shows a teardown of the lithium-ion battery used inside the iPhone 6 Plus. While the teardown and the article seemed motivated by determining the cost of this battery — somewhere...

Mary Meeker is a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins who publishes annually a report on internet trends. Her 2015 report can be found here. One can find some interesting insight and subtle observations on how our new digital society is evolving and using...

Fact: I am able to ride a significantly longer distance on my bicycle than I can drive in my electric vehicle….it can be frustrating to see my electric vehicle run out of juice! So I began to wonder on a recent cycling trip to what extent my Ford Focus Electric vehicle was...

It’s all over the media: Moore’s Law just turned 50! What is Moore’s Law? It’s more an observation than a law, but it has stuck around, now 50 years, that we think it is a law, like gravity. On 19 April 1965, Gordon Moore, at the time the head of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor...

Tesla Motors announced a few days back its new battery pack for the residential market. Called the PowerWall, it will be offered through Tesla’s sister company, SolarCity, to residential customers. Tesla says that this home battery will allow consumers to charge...

Apple just released its Apple Watch joining a growing list of manufacturers of new smart watches, including Samsung, LG, Motorola and others. These watches include, in addition to timekeeping, features such as messaging, basic email, navigation, in some...

Ultrafire is a China-based vendor of 18650 lithium-ion cells. One can buy their 18650 cells from eBay, Amazon and lots of other web-based stores. I was intrigued last week when I saw on eBay Ultrafire 18650 cells advertised with a charge capacity of 5,000 mAh...

We have covered in prior blogs the operation of batteries in smartphones. The vast majority of such devices use single-cell batteries. In other words, there is one physical cell that is the battery. As such, it has a given charge capacity measured in mAh or...

NASA landed in July 1969 the Apollo 11 on the surface of the moon. Along with the famed astronauts was the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), a 1960s-era computer to navigate the spaceship to the moon and back. A reliable machine for its time...

Samsung announced in September 2014 its GALAXY Note 4, a giant but elegant 6-in screen smartphone with a specified battery capacity of 3,220 mAh. It also made a bold claim that it charges the smartphone to 50% in 30 minutes. The marketing snippet...

You are shopping for a new smartphone and you are trying to understand how long the battery will last. But you can’t seem to get a straight answer. Apple says the iPhone 6 will last up to 14 hours of talk time on 3G but you are really not going to have your...

Did you know that the European semiconductor giant ST Micro makes rechargeable lithium-ion batteries? Probably not. You don’t believe me; go ahead and google “ST Micro thin-film batteries.” It’s really tiny. It is a square that measures one inch (25.7 mm)...

This year’s Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona was buzzing with a number of announcements, with the much anticipated Samsung S6 and wearables taking front seat. All the major players in the mobile space, with the exception of Apple, proudly...

You have heard of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, but MWC, what is that? Most consumers are not aware that it is one of the premier tradeshows where mobile devices OEMs announce and introduce their newest gadgets and devices...

Most of us recall the days of the flip phone, a mere decade ago, when the battery was small, a puny 800 mAh, yet it lasted days. Over these past several years, our phones got smarter, they got sophisticated, and the battery took the brunt of this evolution...

You are mobile. You travel. You own a smartphone, a tablet, and a laptop. You are always on the lookout for a power outlet that is not used by a competitor, i.e., another mobile traveler like you. You hate compromise. You need fast charging in each of your...

On 24 September 2009, A123 Systems become a public company trading under the ticker symbol of AONE on the NASDAQ. Its shares soared on the first day of trading closing the day at $20.29 per share, making the company valued at nearly $1.2 Billion. It...