Envelope tracking: a game-changer for smartphones?
During the 2014 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Eta Devices will be demonstrating the full power of ETAdvanced for LTE Advanced with transmission over 80 MHz channels and will also be spotlighting what the company claims is the world’s first smartphone power management chip designed to support ETAdvanced technology.
The Eta5 PMIC has been tailored to work with Eta Devices’ patented ETAdvanced technology which builds on Asymmetric Multilevel Outphasing (AMO) technology that was developed at MIT. ETAdvanced is a platform technology with applications for mobile stations, smartphones, tablets and laptop computers.
“ETAdvanced is the future of envelope tracking and we’re proud to be the first company to bring this next generation technology to the market,” said Mattias Astrom, CEO and founder of Eta Devices. “Everyone is increasingly frustrated by the short battery lives of their smartphones. ETAdvanced extends the battery life by up to 50% by significantly increasing the efficiency of the power amplifier which consumes as much as 70% of the power in a smartphone.”
Mobile communications is currently experiencing explosive data growth and to meet the demands of increasingly data hungry customers, future LTE deployments will focus on LTE Advanced, the latest version of the LTE standard.
“A challenge with LTE Advanced is the technology is using ultra wideband channels of up to 100 MHz,” said MIT Professor Joel Dawson, CTO and founder of Eta Devices. “No existing efficiency enhancing technology, including envelope tracking, is capable of supporting channels wider than 20-40 MHz. Once LTE Advanced is launched by mobile operators, smartphones without ETAdvanced will suffer from significantly shorter battery life compared to today, and many users may find themselves out of battery by lunchtime. This means users will only really get to enjoy the benefits of LTE Advanced if the technology is coupled with ETAdvanced in smartphones. Otherwise, LTE Advanced will remain a showcase technology at Mobile World Congress but without practical use to consumers.”
Beyond increasing the efficiency of conventional GaAs PAs, the additional improvements of ETAdvanced make it possible for CMOS PAs to operate more efficiently than the best GaAs PAs deployed today. Previously the efficiency of CMOS PAs has been too low for inclusion in smartphones.
“Increasing the efficiency of CMOS PAs has been the Holy Grail in the semiconductor industry for a long time. Before ETAdvanced, no technology has been able to deliver the required efficiency levels. This is a truly disruptive innovation that will reshape the industry,” explained Astrom.
“With its many advantages available already today, ETAdvanced is the only future-proof efficiency enhancing technology on the market,” claimed Astrom. “Envelope tracking was a good first step forward for the industry, but the technology needed to mature into ETAdvanced before real world performance benefits could be delivered.”
A key difficulty with Envelope tracking is that its efficiency plunges at higher data rates. Envelope trackers often require a relatively large capacitor to store and release bursts of energy while maintaining smooth and continuous voltage changes. Eta Devices has adopted a different approach, which uses fast, abrupt changes with a smaller capacitor which is more efficient. Eta’s engineering team have developed a digital signal processing solution that overcomes the problems associated with changes in energy that cause more noise in the wireless signal.
Eta Devices’s founders include two MIT electrical engineering professors, Prof. David J. Perreault and Prof. Joel L. Dawson which is the company’s CTO and Dr. Mark Briffa, Eta’s Chief Architect and a former lead power amplifier (PA) researcher for Ericsson and Huawei.
Eta Devices was initially funded in 2012 by $6 million from Ray Stata, co-founder of Analog Devices, and his venture funding company, Stata Venture Partners.
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