Mobile phones offer freedom, convenience and portability-as long as the battery works. In Cupertino, Calif., Tropian Inc. is developing technologies it hopes will breath new life into the problem of the dying cellular phone.
“Tropian has fundamentally redesigned key radio-frequency circuits of cell phones to make them much more energy efficient,” said Dr. Earl McCune, Tropian’s president. “The company’s circuit designs use less than half the battery energy of today’s phones, meaning that users can talk twice as long on their phones before recharging them.”
Tropian develops techniques for RF modulation, demodulation and power amplification that optimize the power consumption and spectral occupancy of wireless communications in cellular handsets and microcellular base stations.
The company said its technology also enables base station manufacturers to improve spectral purity and decrease the amount of heat the RF power amplifier generates-a feature Tropian hopes will work especially well with future data applications, as they generate much more heat than voice.
“By reducing the energy used by the battery, we reduce the heat generated in the RF power amplifier, the primary barrier between today’s handsets and high-speed data applications,” said McCune.
Tropian, formerly known as Premier RF, was established in 1996 by Michael J. Elliott, former chairman and chief executive officer of Digital RF Solutions, and current chairman and CEO of Tropian. It’s comprised of 25 employees and growing.
Elliott said Tropian emerged out of the lack of attention paid by the industry to the specific circuit-based inefficiencies of cellular phones and the resulting problems with battery life.
“When we decided to look at this, the most difficult part of mobile devices is how to use electrons more efficiently. We came to the conclusion that there really had to be a rethinking of the physical layer of the phone,” said Elliott.
Battery life has been one of the major obstacles to cell phones becoming a household product, according to McCune.
“If other consumer products, like television, had to be recharged on a regular basis, chances are they never would have become a household product,” McCune said.
The present technology out there has gone as far as it can go, Elliott contended.
“What came out of Tropian is a technology that has broader applications. GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) has tremendous market potential,” he said.
“Handset manufacturers can use the technology as they see fit. They can build phones that are the same size as today’s, but with longer battery life, or make ones that are smaller with the same battery life-or a combination of both,” McCune said.
Tropian said in the short term, it is marketing its technology to handset and base station manufacturers, but it also has applications in other markets such as high-speed Internet and other data services.
“Our goal is to be in handsets in the market in the year 2000. The marketplace we’re going after is growing tremendously and we expect to get a piece of that market. We expect preproduction at the end of ’99, depending on how our relationships develop,” said Elliott. “Where there is RF use, there is a use for this kind of technology.”
