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Technology Stocks : VALENCE TECHNOLOGY (VLNC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FMK who wrote (6829)	1/8/1999 11:41:00 AM
From: HQ	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 27311

Thanks, Fred. More technical questions: It sounds like each section of laminate provides 3.8 volts, whether it is made 1mm or 4mm thick. Is this your understanding? Are these sections equivalent to what you also called "bi-cells," or "battery sandwiches?" It then sounds like each stack of such sections for the cellphone battery construction (8 or 9 sections per stack, you're thinking) then has all the section elements (bi-cells) attached in parallel, so that the stack still maintains a capacity of 3.8 volts Is this correct? So the reasonable conjecture is that to make batteries for a Palm V, one only needs to have one of the assembly lines to be adjusted to cut the 1mm sheets to the correct sizes; and then the other machinery needs to be adjusted to handle and stack as many of these new-sized sections as are desired. And it also sounds like the Palm only needs 3.8v, so that if the thinner (1mm) sections are stacked only 2 or 3 high, they'd be connected in parallel. . (Though if the new Palm V design could accept a 4mm thickness, and if it does only need 3.8v, you'd think they'd just use the 4mm thick laminate section to begin with, if it's equivalent to 4-1mm thick sections, since it's easier to manufacture, having fewer leads and less assembly. The speculation here seems to be that the battery would be thinner than that...so perhaps 2-1mm sections is the best guess, which would allow them to tuck the battery into the back of the case nicely.) And of course, the exception to this is the laptop battery, which you're saying is a stack of three 4mm sections, which are then connected in series rather than in parallel, to provide 11.4volts. Correct? This would makes for a 1.2cm-thick "brick." So let me ask a dumb question: do laptop systems still require such high voltages? The power requirements for the processors and boards have been reduced to where I'd been thinking a 3.8v battery would be adequate for the main board. Isn't this correct? So is it the display, hard drive, or cd-rom that requires the higher voltage? Thanks in advance to anyone else who wants to weigh in here.