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Where Moore’s Law Meets the Limits of Electrochemistry

In other words, Moore’s law is enabling the mobile OEMs to add features and functionality to the products that they sell, but at the same time the power and power management needed to support these additions are at a premium. Conventional wisdom is that much of the future revenue potential for the Power IC industry will derive from this conflict. Manufacturers of Power ICs and related products see their opportunity in enabling mobile OEMs to enhance their products, while maintaining small product size and low weight. Like most conventional wisdom, however, this view is only half correct. While it is most certainly true that the opportunities for power-management companies depend on the gap between the functionality required by mobile electronics devices and the power available to drive them, it is unrealistic to believe OEMs will keep adding features forever or that battery technology will always be as limited as it is now.

As both electronic device feature and functionality trends and battery trends change, so will the market for mobile Power ICs. The analysis is fleshed out in CIR’s new report: Power ICs in the Mobile Device Market: A Five-Year Forecast of OEM Requirements, which contains quantitative projections of Power ICs for all main mobile electronic devices. This report will soon be available for purchase from CIR.

It’s Not the Screen, It’s the Wireless

Of all the features being added to mobile electronics devices, improved displays are getting the most attention from the Power IC industry. In a typical notebook, the LCD display accounts for about 33% of the power consumption. No other subsystem comes close. In handheld and cell phone design, the big power concern is the new generation of color displays, which are not only intrinsically harder on the battery than the black and white displays of yesteryear, but are also left on longer to accommodate enhanced features such as Internet access and gaming. By contrast, the cooling fan on a notebook PC uses only about 4% of total power.

But do displays any longer really represent an opportunity for the Power IC industry? The importance of displays is well understood by every mobile Power IC manufacturer and they are all addressing it in one way or another. There do not appear to be any disruptive power management technologies in the offing that will blow more conventional approaches out of the water.

The one technology innovation that really will have an impact on power management for displays is the advent of advanced LED technology. According to some sources, LEDs could produce the same amount of light for 10 % of the power. LEDs will be used at first to replace CCFL lighting for backlighting LCD displays. Later, LEDs will replace LCDs in the displays themselves. It could be at least a couple of years before LEDs begin to show some real signs of taking over the display market, and as they do so they will create a new market for the semiconductor industry for LED drivers and power-converter chips aimed at the LED-power environment. However, as LEDs increasingly become the technology of choice for displays, the challenge of displays for power management and the opportunities for Power IC manufacturers in this area will decrease dramatically.