A little over a decade ago, I was writing and editing articles about trends toward smaller, lighter devices with greater functionality. As many devices have become small enough to be easily carried around, we are increasingly discussing handheld devices longer battery life.

In fact, we are not just discussing battery life, we are desperately looking for new battery technologies and new chip-design techniques to make our portable computers cum wireless communication devices cum entertainment centers run longer on batteries.

Rick Merritt in this issue writes about notebook makers' vision for the portable computer next year. It is an instantly-on machine—the PC vendor's dream for as long as I can remember—that wirelessly hooks up to all sorts of consumer A/V equipment, PDAs and cellphones, and allows high-quality A/V streaming. While Merritt reports on the wrangling with various standards that play their part to make this happen, I cannot help but wonder how much more power the machines will guzzle simply because we will run all that multimedia content a lot more often than we do now.

According to Yrjo Neuvo, former executive VP and CTO for Nokia Mobile Phones, and currently a technology adviser to the company, the communications industry faces a power consumption problem that cannot be solved by fuel cells or other new battery technologies.

A number of reports make out fuel-cell technology to be just around the corner for laptops. Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu and Samsung have all shown prototypes. A startup called UltraCell announced earlier this year that it will sell production models of its version of fuel cells next year. The cells will enable laptops to run up to 14hrs and consumers will be able to refuel their laptops with $4 cartridges. Meanwhile, another startup, MTI Micro, is developing fuel-cell prototypes for Samsung's mobile phones.

I don't know if they'll allow you to carry a few cartridges of the fuel cells on board an aircraft when you are traveling. But if they're available at the local 7/11 store, this just might work—only that might not be just around the corner.

Neuvo believes that better system and IC design is needed to give you an order of magnitude improvement in power efficiency. That would be so much better than framing standards for fuel-cell form factors and connectors. The industry's track record for quickly standardizing new technology isn't—well, isn't there.

In the interim, we need to improve power management to avoid delivering a power guzzler to the consumer's hand. On the system-design front, a number of companies are proposing digital power control or management, and this issue shines the Spotlight on digital power. National Semiconductor's Ravi Ambatipudi defines digital power management as using either digital feedback loops or SoCs to intelligently control voltage regulators. Read Paul O' Shea's article, "Designers weigh digital power trade-offs," to get various perspectives, including those from Analog Devices and Maxim.

Sabin Lupan, senior FAE at Primarion, looks at the challenge from the customer's standpoint and covers the design-to-manufacture chain from design engineering to test engineering to manufacturing/OEM. National Semiconductor's Vik Sangha focuses on 3G cellphones and the power-management challenges they present in their evolution toward portable TV sets, gaming machines and music players.

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