During the launch of the Galaxy S20 series in February, Samsung also announced new TWS earbuds called the Galaxy Buds+. The new earbuds boast nearly double the battery life of last year’s Galaxy Buds without a change in the dimensions. Want to know how Samsung was able to pull it off?
According to a press release by the tech giant, they were able to fit a bigger battery into the Galaxy Buds+ while keeping the dimensions of the 2019 Galaxy Buds as a result of the all-in-one power management integrated circuits (PMIC) they designed for the earbuds.
These all-in-one power ICs, called MUA01 and MUB01, are the first of their kinds in the industry and they have been specifically optimized for use in TWS earbuds.
What Samsung has achieved with the ICs is no small feat. They have been able to combine multiple components (up to 10) into a single chip and thus created more room for a bigger battery for the earbuds. To further understand the scale of what they have done, imagine if Samsung decided not to increase the battery capacity but rather shrunk the size of the earbuds, thus making them even smaller while maintaining the battery life of the previous generation.
Samsung says the MUA01 IC was designed for earbuds while the MUB01 IC was designed for charging cases. Part of the components the PMICs contain include the switching chargers and discharge circuits. By doing this, they freed up more space occupied by components for a bigger battery.
These PMICs are also the first in the world to support both wireless (WPC’s Qi 1.2.4 standard) and wireless charging in a single chip. The MUA01, which is designed for earbuds, even has a microcontroller unit (MCU) and embedded Flash (eFlash) to provide the option of modifying its firmware to work with other applications.
Samsung’s press release also revealed that the ICs support power line communication (PLC) which allows them to talk to each other via the charging pins and share info such as battery levels and whether the earbuds are inside the case.
MUA01 and MUB01 are being mass-produced already, and while they already appear in the Galaxy Buds+, we may see them in other TWS earbuds in the future.
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