Mobile Power: No Solution On The Horizon

We are so excited about the pace of technology progress. Every problem seems to be just a temporary problem, with a solution already on the horizon. Faster connection speeds. Faster processors. Smarter algorithms. Stronger materials. All those inventions make possible things that were not possible just a while ago. But there are certain fundamental technology problems, which will not be solved. At least not before the end of the current decade.

One such problem is supply of power to mobile devices. Before we even start thinking about mobile devices, let us realize the power problem has become the biggest problem in the non-mobile computing world. Fulfilling the Moore's Law, we are able to scale down the geometries and scale up densities. The concentration of raw computing power per physical volume is skyrocketing. And so is the power draw. And still all the power consumed by electronic circuitry is turned into heat, which has to be dissipated. To dissipate the heat, we use even more power, to run the active cooling systems. We build data centers not where a connectivity is, but where a cheap power can be delivered.

Things are an order of magnitude more difficult, when we have to break free from copper wires used to deliver power. If we cut the wires and go mobile, we need to take stored energy with us. We need storage. With capacity. Unfortunately we still cannot master the storage of electric energy. Batteries run flat too early too often. No matter how much we try to restrict the appetite for energy consumption. And, really, is restricting the appetite a way to go? We could stay with slow processors and low refresh rate screens. But do we want to? 4G LTE networks already deliver mobile bandwidth in excess of 50Mbps. Don't we want to consume that bandwidth? Surely we do. So we need powerful processors to do that. To run firewall tasks. To render high definition multimedia. To run multiplayer online games.

And the appetite for power will only grow. Think the new user interfaces. We are nearing the end of touch computing era. It started with QWERTY keyboards long time ago. It peaks with touch tablets today. Touchless is the next frontier. To get there we have to master technologies like voice recognition and mind reading. A single EEG brain scan generates 2GB of raw data. And we want to do it probably 60 times a second. And simultaneously process the acquired data in real time. The most powerful computers can barely handle such tasks today. And we want to do it in a pocket. By 2020 there will be mobile processors capable of doing that. But I am not so sure there will be batteries able to run them for a week. We will have to live with daily recharge habits for a foreseeable time.

There are technologies to help. All related to nanotechnology. One is HSA, or High Surface Area materials. Capacity of an electric battery is proportional to the active surface area inside it. With special HSA compounds, we can roll significantly more surface to form a battery of a given size. But 3-5 times does not make a change. We need two orders of magnitude more. We will probably not get to that level, until we master nano fuel cells based on hydrogen, or, even better, nano - confined nuclear fusion.