Want your phone battery to last a week? This startup may have the key

Remember when your phone only needed charging twice a week? Those were the good old days, when Snake was the game to beat and people actually used phones to talk to each other. With their voices.

But the Nokia 3310 is a thing of the past, and as devices have gotten more complex, their chips burn energy faster than ever. In Seoul, smartphone users carry around charging cables and spare batteries all day to stay connected.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Baum, a South Korean startup, claims to have developed enterprise software to help engineers make their chips more efficient, and analyze power consumption 100 times faster than current methods. This means a lot for us everyday electronics users.

“Engineers can reduce the power consumption of their chips and smartphones to more than two, three, even 10 times less than the present power consumption, which means you can use your phone for a week,” CEO Steve Yi tells Tech in Asia.

We can’t relive the days of yore, but we might get those long-lasting batteries back. Photo credit: Windows blog.

The implications go beyond that: it could mean less power needed for Internet of Things devices, smart cars, and even the massive server farms that hold your Google and Facebook data. Less power consumption means less heat, and less energy needed to keep those chips cool.

Baum, meaning tree in German, was named with the philosophy that reining in power consumption will help reduce carbon emissions. “Trees are a good way to cool down the whole world on a large scale. Likewise, our tools help people […] to cool down the chip temperatures or energy consumption on a large scale, like a tree,” Steve explains.

From left: Baum co-founders Changwon Choi, Ellis Kim, and CEO Steve Yi.

Its software, PowerBaum, is ready to hit the market, and the company expects chipmakers such as Samsung and Qualcomm to fall for it like dominoes.

Here’s how it works

The chip in your phone is divided into circuit blocks, like parts of a car. Each time you tell the phone to open an app, a billion signals in those circuits switch on and off to process that request. But some of the circuits might be turning on unnecessarily – like having the wipers go on when you turn on the ignition – thus using more power than needed and draining your battery.

Software companies in this field, called electronic design automation, like Ansys and Synopsys make big bucks measuring how much power chips use so that engineers can test out their designs before production.

Baum hopes to feed a more power-efficient computer chip ecosystem. Image credit: Andre Gunawan, Tech in Asia.

Ready to go – kinda

There’s just one problem