Electronics & systems

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 “sleep time.”

I explained in a prior post the power needs in a smartphone, including the display, the radio functions…etc. If all these functions are constantly operating, the battery in a smartphone would last at most a couple of hours. So the key to having a smartphone battery last all day is having down time. So by now, you have hopefully noticed how the industry uses “sleep” terminology to describe these periods of time when the smartphone is nominally not active.

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 as the 8996. The battery specifications on the S7 include a polymer cell rated at 3,000 mAh, equivalent to 11.55 Wh. The teardown on iFixit shows a cell that is manufactured by ATL  rated to 4.4 V. Once again, the choice of battery manufacturer is surprising given that Samsung Electronics for years sourced the vast majority of their batteries from their sister company Samsung SDI.

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. The early posts of this blog describe the operation of the lithium-ion battery in more detail.  I will briefly recap here the basic operation and explain where its performance is limited. For the reader who wants to learn more, select “The Basics” category tag and feel free to review these earlier posts.

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 that it was spinning off its self-driving car unit into a standalone business setting up the stage for a fleet of self-driving taxis that will compete head-to-head with Uber, which itself is investing heavily in self-driving vehicles. Tesla, GM, Mercedes Benz, Ford and several others have not been shy in the media, all announcing efforts and prototypes towards autonomous driving.