250
A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years
(www.techradar.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
250 points (86.1% liked)
Technology
60306 readers
2912 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The issue is not the radioactivity, it's the power density. Per the article, this is ~24x smaller than an average phone battery, but can supply only 100uW.
I have a relatively conservative phone use, and on average, my phone uses 450mW. That means that you'd need 4500 of those batteries in your phone. But the battery would also need to cover the power usage peaks, which are multiple times higher than the average power consumption.
The obvious hand-wave is to charge a capacitor and power the phone from that.
Even if it'd have to be a glorified Game Boy to fit that average power budget. You could do it. There's Cortex M0s that'll go on standby down to the nanoamps. At that point you're running on the idea of electricity. You could power that circuit with an intense stare. They're still up in the low mA for doing anything, but what they'll do there is plenty for Snake.
Yes, but we're talking about mobile phones. The lowest power consumption GSM modules I know of still require ~10mW on the lowest power setting. And that's just for calls and sms, forget background tasks like messaging apps or social media.