A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years

0x4E4F@sh.itjust.works to Technology@lemmy.world – 19 points –
A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years
techradar.com
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Sensationalized clickbait.

100 microwatts, aiming for 1W in 2025. That's a big difference and 1W is still not enough for a cell phone. Phone-scale batteries aren't even on the roadmap.

1 Watt is plenty to power a phone on average. While idle a phone uses less than 1 Watt. The thing is, nuclear batteries are a misnomer, they're actual electrical generators. For this to work in a phone, you'd want to pair it with an actual battery, and the generator would charge the battery while the phone is idle and that would provide enough power on average for when you're actively using your phone.

My thoughts exactly. Unless it can output at least double of what the phone's max drain is, there is no other way.

1W is enough for a cell phone, if you combined it with a capacitor for brief bursts at higher watts.

Now play a game for an hour...

Not all phones need to play games and gaming phones don't need to use this type of technology. I would love a phone that I don't need to charge and most people could benefit from one. And for the select few that like to play intensive games on it then they can get ones that would need to be charged.

Though I doubt this technology will be the answer to that want though.

Yeah especially with just 0.001% of the estimated workload (~10W when gaming, but even when standby 0.5W, 100uW are still just 0.02% of that...). Needs a lot more research...

You throttle the cpu with long heavy workloads, just like phones already do due to the significant thermal constraints of the form factor.

My phone uses 0.6W when idle and 1.2-2.5W while I'm using it. Peaks are 8W+. No way an internal reactor only can power a phone.

Edit: 0.3W when screen is off.

You could do it with a parallelized output from a bunch of them.