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Vendors Contemplate Formal Standards For Lithium Ion |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Friday, 22 September 2006 |
A meeting
in San Jose has discussed how industry standards for the Lithium Ion
batteries used in mobile devices can be formulated more quickly in the
wake of an increasing number of potentially dangerous incidents and
extensive manufacturer recalls.
The meeting, which included attendees from Dell, HP, Lenovo and Polycom,
was called prior to the very public problems and subsequent recall of
Lithium Ion batteries manufactured by Sony, according to Ars Technica. But it was apparently called in response to concerns about the increasing number of problems associated with the battery
technology, as the maunfacturers were probably accutely aware of the issues before the bogosphere got hold of it.
Somewhat ironically, the manufactrer at the centre of the current 6
million unit recall, Sony, was apparently not invited to the meeting.
The meeting todiscuss the proposed lithium-ion battery standards was called by industry standards group, IPC.
The IPC, originally formed in 1957 as the Institute for Printed
Circuits before changing its name to the Institute of Interconnecting
and Packaging
Electronic Circuits before finally settling on IPC - Association
Connecting Electronics Industries has an OEM Critical Components
Committee which this month was chaired by none other than Dell.
It's
quite odd, really that battery standards don't already exist, since
many other computer computenets are goverened by agreed industry
standards. This has significant advantages for manufacturers and
vendors as well as end users as increased competition drives pricing
down, economises of scale drive manufacturing costs down and the
sharing of research and design load amongst several vendors drives
product design cost lower.
By adopting a standard industry-wide battery component, it is hoped
that the constant changes to product design and manufacturing process
design, which at the moment changes for every notebook model produced,
would not only drive down cost but would also foster a safewr battery
as manfacuturing mistakes and desgin problems could be more easily
weeded out of the industry.
In the past manufacturers may have favoured proporietary designs for their notbeook batteries as they can drive aftermarket repalcement revenues at high margin. Masive recalls, however, not only impact on profits, but threated consuemr confidence. Thenewer Lithium Ion bateries are also much longer lasting than Ni-MH batteries used in earlier models as those suffered from the memory effect.
According to the reports, the group plans to reconvene next month and
hopes to have the proposed new standards completed by the second
quarter of next year.
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