Ex-MIT company rethinks power-feasting amplifiers
(Phys.org)—Technologists generally agree that power amplifiers have proven to be inefficient pieces of hardware. Turning electricity into radio signals, they eat into the battery life of smartphones and they waste power. One may find that a cellular phone cannot stream live video without running down the battery in minutes. Now a team of engineers have come up with an alternative amplifier technology that can extend smartphone battery life. Eta Devices, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts with an office in Stockholm, and cofounded by two MIT electrical engineering professors, Joel Dawson and David Perreault, offers a new amplifier design. The result is described in Technology Review as a "blazingly fast electronic gearbox." The engineers call their approach "asymmetric multilevel outphasing (AMO)." It is able to "intelligently" select, among voltages that can be sent across the transistor, the one that minimizes power consumption.