Tired of waiting for a longer period of time to charge your mobile device? Is your device draining power quickly? Texas Instruments might just have the solution to these problems with their recently announced MaxLife technology. This technology promises to improve battery life by as much as 30 percent and reduce the amount of time needed to charge it.

Texas Instruments announced two power management chipsets which allows single cell Li-ion batteries to be charged faster and hold more power. The company’s bq27530 and bq27531 fuel gauge circuits combined with the bq2416x and bq2419x chargers optimizes the performance of batteries at the same time minimizing its degradation.

According to Steve Lambouses, VP of TI’s analog business unit, “When you try to charge battery fast, you put a lot of energy into the battery. That actually damages the battery so that the battery does not last as long as many cycles. So you may get really fast charge, one month and two month later you realize the battery does not last long any more that’s because you have damaged the battery and degrading the life of the battery. So you have to find a way to charge the battery not damaging the battery.”

A typical Li-Ion battery loses 8 percent of its lifetime capacity after it charges and discharges in 100 cycles. The use of MaxLife technology lets the battery keep 95 percent of its power losing only 5 percent in 100 cycles.

The key to this technology is the fuel gauge chipsets which knows detailed information of the battery such as chemistries, cycles and temperature. This can then be used by the battery to control charging.

Some of the key features of the new MaxLife technology include

• Faster charging during adult to 4.5-A rates for single-cell lithium batteries.
• Extended battery use life with smallest plunge of run-time after any liberate cycle.
• High-efficiency charging with extended thermal government and reduced feverishness generation.
• High-performance Impedance Track monitoring complement provides a many accurate ability determination and accurate control of charging stream and stop thresholds.

The two chipsets are now available in the market along with the development kit.  It’s only a matter of time before we see this technology being used in mobile devices to help improve power management.

via engadget

The Droid Guy