If there was any product revealed at CES last week that pushed battery life claims to a whole new level—and raised some eyebrows too—it was HyperX’s pair of 300-hour headphones. The wireless gaming headset, called Cloud Alpha Wireless, will supposedly offer 300 hours of continuous use on a single charge when the product launches this spring. This is up from 30 hours per charge in HyperX’s previous model, the Cloud II Wireless.
A 10-fold improvement in battery life over a short time period is practically unheard of in consumer electronics. HyperX declined to share specific details as to how it accomplished this leap, except to say that it deployed a combination of battery and chip technologies and that it updated its “dual chamber technology” and drivers to accommodate a 1,500-mAh lithium-polymer battery. “HyperX’s New Gaming Headphones Get 300 Hours of Battery Life, and I Don’t Know How That’s Possible” was the headline Gizmodo chose for its story about these seemingly immortal sound cans.
And HyperX wasn’t alone at CES in its bonkers battery claims. Technics’ newest wireless headphones are expected to get 50 hours per charge. Chipmaker AMD said its new Ryzen chips would enable 24-hour battery life in laptops. Even electric-car makers were in on it, with Mercedes promising more than 600 miles per charge in its Vision EQXX prototype vehicle.
Since none of these products are available yet, it’s hard to know whether they'll live up to the hype. Experts say battery life is getting better in consumer electronics—through a combination of super-efficient processors, low-power states, and a little help from advanced technologies like silicon anode. It’s just not necessarily getting 10 times better. Conventional lithium-ion batteries have their energy density limits, and they typically improve by single-digit percentages each year. And there are downsides to pushing the limits of energy density.
“Batteries are getting a little bit better, but when batteries get better in energy density, there’s usually a trade-off with cycle life,” says Venkat Srinivasan, who researches energy storage and is the director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science. “If you go to the big consumer electronics companies, they’ll have a metric they want to achieve, like we need the battery to last for 500 cycles over two or three years. But some of the smaller companies might opt for longer run times, and live with the fact that the product might not last two years.”
Srinivasan, like many other technologists these days, is optimistic that relatively new developments in silicon-anode technology will improve battery life. (One of the companies Srinivasan advises, called Enovix, has developed a cell architecture for silicon-anode batteries that it believes will set it apart from others in the market.) Conventional graphite-based lithium-ion batteries are rechargeable batteries in which lithium ions move from the negative electrode (anode) to the positive electrode (cathode). A key component of these batteries is graphite, which goes in the anode and is highly conductive. In silicon-anode batteries, silicon nanoparticles replace some or all of the graphite in the anode. This silicon can, in theory, absorb more lithium than graphite, which equates to more energy density; it’s also prone to swelling and even fracturing.
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One company that’s aiming to improve lithium-ion batteries by as much as 50 percent is Sila Nano, which WIRED profiled late last year. Sila Nano’s technology, which includes a composite particle that is about half silicon, could deliver as much as a 20 percent increase in energy density, or as much as a 40 percent improvement over time, the company claims. And it’s currently working with BMW and Daimler on batteries for EVs, as well as batteries for consumer electronics products.
In September 2021, buzzy wristband-maker Whoop revealed a new version of its activity-tracker that’s powered partly by Sila Nano’s tech. The new wristband was said to match the previous tracker’s battery life of five days, but with a much smaller battery cell. The Whoop 4.0 launch was noteworthy because it was the first time Sila Nano's tech shipped in a consumer product. But it was also marred by a series of customer complaints on Reddit about Whoop batteries that wouldn’t charge and delayed response times from customer service.
Alex Jacobs, a spokesperson for Whoop, said that Sila's technology is located in the battery within the Whoop 4.0 device itself, not the battery pack (which charges and attaches to the device separately). He also said, “We are aware of feedback from some of our members who have experienced issues charging their WHOOP Battery Pack 4.0, and are working hard to ensure that this is corrected.” The company has issued firmware updates to try to solve the problems.
Enovix, the company Srinivasan advises, is also working on a silicon-based solution, but it is taking a slightly different approach. It’s making what it calls a “3D” silicon battery architecture, which involves stacking electrodes rather than coiling them up within the battery cell—an approach to battery design that borrows from chipmaking methods, which the company says makes more effective use of the space within batteries.
Enovix cofounder and chief executive Harrold Rust points out at least four challenges to widespread adoption that are inherent to silicon-anode batteries. One is the swelling that occurs with silicon; another, the manufacturing of it. (Gene Berdichevsky, the founder of Sila Nano, has also told WIRED that the manufacturing of silicon nanoparticles is difficult to scale.) Another problem is energy efficiency, which varies from material to material in lithium-ion batteries. And, Rust says, “the silicon anode itself tends to have poor cycle life, which means after a hundred cycles, maybe, your battery has lost 20 percent of its capacity.”
Still, Rust is bullish on the potential for silicon anode. “We’re pretty confident that what we say our battery can do, it will do, based on the testing we’ve done,” he says. “And we expect to be in products this year that demonstrate that.”
WIRED asked HyperX, the maker of the 300-hour headphones, whether the company was using silicon-anode technology in its upcoming product. A spokesperson for the company, Gurpreet Bhoot, said, “We don’t have access to that level of design detail,” and reiterated that the new headphones will be the first gaming headset on the market to offer 300 hours of battery life on a single charge. Later, after more inquiries, the spokesperson said HyperX’s designs are proprietary. For now, HyperX may be squeezing out extra battery life the old-fashioned way: by designing for bigger batteries, building with hyper-efficient processors, or using certain methods to reduce power consumption when the headphones aren’t in use.
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Which is not a bad way to improve battery life. Srinivasan points out that there’s a “parallel going on” with all of these advances in battery tech, which is that the electronics are getting more efficient as entrepreneurs are intent on pushing battery life to the max.
“I’m thinking about Apple’s M1 chip, which is obviously specific to Apple, but the idea is that technologists are minimizing the load on batteries,” says Srinivasan, “while there’s this simultaneous strength being added to batteries. Maybe the important thing we’re seeing here is the confluence of these two things.”
Update, January 19 at 2:40pm: This story was updated to include an additional statement from Whoop and a clarification about the performance of Sila Nano's technology.
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