While we work on a better battery in the lab, keep busy with this

The way we've dealt with batteries not advancing as much as electronics has been to make the electronics more and more efficient. So the electronics have gotten faster and more capable, and at the same time, they use less power.  So the same poor battery looks better.

That's not to take away from the amazing work done by battery manufacturers.  They've made things a lot better. But we haven't quite reached the same advances in battery technology that we've reached in electronics technology.

And so, with our erstwhile battery cell scientists working hard to create the holy grail battery, the electronics side continues to improve their side of the equation.

Engineers at the University of Cambridge  have come up with a very low power transistor. A transistor, when it turns off, still has some residual energy flowing. And this principle was exploited by the scientists. They claim the amount of power the new design uses is so small as to be somewhat negligible compared to today's technology.

Currently, this is being targetted for sensors. And they are also considering using energy scavaging to power these sensors instead of dedicating a battery to them.

This is very exciting news. We are all for better batteries, and we are also for equipment that uses our batteries better. And even equipment that doesn't need much battery at all.

Will this result in more than just low power sensors? I'm sure it will some day. One of the other advantages to what these engineers have discovered is a way to make transistors smaller. With smaller transistors using less energy, we can do more processing with less heat.

This let's keep an eye on this tech and expect our new cell phones that will last a lot longer on the same battery. And we should expect them to be smaller, too.