Semi-conductors supplier ST-Ericsson last night unveiled a mobile device chipset that it says will add five hours to the battery life of smartphones once adopted by industry.
The Swiss based company, which supplies chipsets and semiconductors to the world’s top mobile companies, said its NovaThor L8580 ModAp was “the world’s fastest and lowest-power integrated LTE smartphone platform” and in low power mode would consume half the power of current chipsets.
Its announcement at first may seem of more relevance to mobile device manufacturers, but in the long term is expected to benefit consumers who grapple with increasingly shorter battery life on their smartphones due to the addition of 4G radios, larger power-hungry screens and modern add-ons such as Near Field Communication (NFC) chips.
At the ShowStoppers event at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last night, an ST-Ericsson representative told The Australian that battery manufacturers were not making much headway in packing more power into increasingly-thin smartphones and were limited by safety concerns such as overheating where they tried to do so.
The new chipset integrates an eQuad 2.5 Gigahertz processor based on an ARM Cortex-A9, an Imagination PowerVR SGX544 graphics processing unit and an advanced multimode LTE modem – on a single chipset.
St-Ericsson says CPUs run 35 per cent faster and consume 25 per cent less power than rival architecture.
ST-Ericsson is a 50-50 joint venture between telecommunications giant Ericsson and semiconductor manufacturer STMicroelectronics formed in 2009.
Chris Griffith travelled to CES in Las Vegas courtesy of Fusion-io and Sony.
