In the modern day, tech companies tend to spend a lot of budget in R&D to stay ahead of the competition. Every company wants to provide new and improved solutions and naturally, if possible, trademark or patent these solutions.
Microsoft recently has been granted a patent that aims to improve the performance of batteries in modern day devices by “dynamically changing internal state of a battery”. As described in the patent, technologies these days do very little to dynamically improve the performance and life of batteries in portable devices.
Techniques for Dynamically changing internal state of a battery are described herein. Generally, different battery configurations are described that enable transitions between different battery power states such, such as to accommodate different battery charge and/or discharge scenarios.
Since portable devices don’t always stay in the same state all the time, altering battery state dynamically (charge and discharge) can definitely help improve the performance/life of a battery.
The patent describes various techniques and scenarios that Microsoft can implement to achieve the performance boost goal for portable batteries. They can alter the nature of electrodes for instance or may be use some materials that change their behavior under specific stimuli. There are a variety of possibilities. If you want to read them in detail, you can do so by yourself here.
The patent ofcourse doesn’t necessarily mean that we will be seeing all these methods being implemented in future Microsoft portable devices like Microsoft Surface or mobile phones. However, patents like these do give us hope with the rapid increase in the usage of these devices, we do need modern technologies to increase those battery lifetimes.