Lithium Sulfer Battery

Battery technology marches on in the never ending quest for the ultimate in portable power.  One of the latest entrants is a new technology called Lithium Sulfer (Li-S).  Sion Power has been developing the new battery for quite some time, and has shown that it will run an HP TC1000 Tablet PC for an entire day (8 hours).  Of course, there’s no indication of the workload on the Tablet PC during the test so the numbers are subject to scrutiny.  If indeed it’s a productive 8 hours, Li-S would give fuel cells some competition.

However, with the good, must come the bad.  In this case it’s weight (they’re heavier than Li-Ion) and a dismal 60 recharge cycles before the battery is useless.  To clarify that last bit, we noticed that other sites reporting on this technology are indicating the 60 recharge cycles figure, but the manufacturer indicates the batteries can be recharged “hundreds of times”.  Assuming Sion Power is correct, Li-S has a shorter, but fairly comparable lifespan against Li-Ion products which are typically good for 300 to 500 recharge cycles.

While Sion Power isn’t the only company developing Li-S batteries, they claim they are the most successful.  With Intel taking an interest in using their technology, they could very well be right.  Don’t expect to see products utilizing Li-S until 2008 at the earliest.

Read More | Sion Power via C|Net Asia