Intel, Matsushita Team To Develop 8-Hour Notebook Battery

TOKYO — Matsushita Battery Industrial Co. and Intel Corp. said they would collaborate to develop batteries able to run a notebook PC for 8 hours without recharging.

The collaboration, announced at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, would leverage Intel's low- power consumption technology for notebook PCs with Matsushita's lithium-ion battery technology. (continued...)

"We expect that the joint development will enable us to propose a solution that enables eight hours of full operation by a [built-in] battery," a Matsushita spokesman said.

Parent company Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. has already developed a notebook PC for the Japanese market offering seven to 12 hours of battery life. The battery run time is based on the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association (JEITA)'s measurement method supported by major PC vendors in Japan, including Dell Computer and IBM.

JEITA's battery run time measurement method integrates major benchmark criteria such as luminous intensity of the display, CPU and hard-disk drive loads. Half of the run time on JEITA's method is idle operation, with the PC screen at the lowest intensity. Thus, the eight-hour run time under JEITA's criteria does not necessarily mean all-day operation.

In March, Matsushita Battery announced a lithium-ion battery that uses nickel oxide for the positive electrode in place of cobalt oxide, improving the battery’s energy density to 600 watt hours per liter, or 15 percent more than a typical lithium-ion battery.

Matsushita Battery will begin shipping the battery in October. Next April, the company plans to introduce a 2.9 ampere-hour version of the nickel-oxide, lithium-ion battery with a volumetric energy density of 620 watt- hours per liter. That battery will form the basis of the collaboration with Intel.

Both companies have not disclosed when the "all-day" battery would become available.

Source: InformationWeek