MOAR POWAH BABY - Qualcomm quick charge 5 brings 100% in 15 minutes

[rcmaehl]

Summary

Qualcomm has teased their new Quick Charge 5 tech, said to charge a phone completely in just 15 minutes.

 

Media:

 

Quotes

Quote

Qualcomm is adding...Quick Charge 5, ...that promises to fully recharge upcoming phones in 15 minutes or go from zero to 50% in only five minutes. Earlier this month,... Vivo unveiled Super FlashCharge 120W, using a custom USB-C cable and charger to deliver similar recharge times... zero to 50% in five minutes, or zero to 100% in 13 minutes. By comparison, Quick Charge 5 uses a standard 3-Amp USB-C cable and promises the aforementioned speeds when recharging the larger 4,500mAh batteries found in plus-sized phones. Moreover, unlike Vivo’s proprietary and yet to be commercialized solution, Quick Charge 5 is widely available to Android OEMs now. That’s why Qualcomm is billing Quick Charge 5 as the “first commercially viable fast charging platform to support more than 100W charging power in a smartphone.” he chipmaker is obliquely referencing both Vivo’s solution and a Xiaomi-developed 100-watt alternative that was announced in 2019 but never released. Some of the performance improvements come from delivering twice the voltage at twice the speed, accessories will support a range of 3.3 to 20 volts. There are now eight levels of voltage protection, three levels of current protection, three levels of thermal protection, and three levels of timer protection. The platform can work with one or two internal batteries at once and is compatible with USB-PD and USB-C standards. Quick Charge 5 phones [include] Snapdragon 865 and 865 Plus devices. Qualcomm says Quick Charge 5 will primarily benefit Android phones but that iPhone 7 and later devices will be able to take advantage of “fast”...speeds when connected to Quick Charge 5.

 

My thoughts

So when is my charging brick going to have it's own cooling fan. We're quickly approaching near instant charging and it would not surprise me for this to be halved again in just a couple years. Battery capacity has been stagnant for a while now and we're rapidly approaching the wall for charging quickness, phone manufacturers will soon be forced into heavy optimizing soon if they want to get noticeable battery life improvements. Regardless, most consumers including myself are going to enjoy these faster and faster charging speeds.

 

Sources

Qualcomm
VentureBeat (Quote S

[Mateyyy]

Is it just me or does pumping 120W through your phone sound kind of sketchy?

[Windows7ge]

One of my biggest questions here would be recharge cycles. Higher voltage, lower amperage = less heat but still how much heat is produced and how will that impact the integrity of the pack on each recharge.

 

I mean it's great if I can charge a phone in 15 minutes but if I only get say 400 cycles out of it instead of 1000+ from degradation then I'd rather take it slow and easy.

[Haro]

Yea. And that 5min is enough to completely destroy the battery lol..

[AndreiArgeanu]

1 minute ago, Windows7ge said:

One of my biggest questions here would be recharge cycles. Higher voltage, lower amperage = less heat but still how much heat is produced and how will that impact the integrity of the pack on each recharge.

Well compared to the previous generation of Quick Charge it claims to be up to 10C cooler so I'd imagine it should be more efficient in that regard and potentially impact the health of the battery less.

[akio123008]

100 watts? That's nuts. I don't even charge my 6s lipos at such a rate.

 

Also what about the charging cable? Does it need to be 15 gauge wire now?

[LAwLz]

8 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

I mean it's great if I can charge a phone in 15 minutes but if I only get say 400 cycles out of it instead of 1000+ from degradation then I'd rather take it slow and easy.

Same here. That's why I charge with a 7 watt charger during the night, a USB cable from my pob during the day (is needed) and only use a quick charger as an emergency charger which is rarely used. 

 

 

For those interested, a third party tested how much faster batteries degrade using quick charing. Sadly it's in Italian so I am relying on a translation and this tweet summarizing it for me.

https://mobile.twitter.com/andreif7/status/1287846007917744132

 

 

After 255 charge cycles with a 65W charger, the battery could only hold 85% of its original charge.

[SupaKomputa]

Awesome, but also scary.

I'll be with my 18w charge, thank you.

We need new batteries tech for this to work well.

Lithium is nearing EOL.

[akio123008]

Just now, SupaKomputa said:

Lithium is nearing EOL.

Well you know anything to replace it?

[SupaKomputa]

1 minute ago, akio123008 said:

Well you know anything to replace it?

https://www.pocket-lint.com/gadgets/news/130380-future-batteries-coming-soon-charge-in-seconds-last-months-and-power-over-the-air

[DeScruff]

I wonder how fast is "fast enough" for most people. Honestly for me getting from ~20-30% to 85% in half an hour is more then good enough.
Thats ether the "Wake up and plug in my phone before leaving for work" or the "plug it in to the car charger while driving to work"

[mr moose]

It's been a long time since I studied this stuff (so long that my diploma doesn't exist anymore),  but as far as I am aware battery chemistry has limits imposed by physics,  no amount of smart electronics and wiring will change that. 

[porina]

Something doesn't add up here. It might just be a badly written article. It mentions you have a "standard" 3A cable, and "double" the voltage. USB basic voltage is 5V, so double that is 10V, with a 3A rated cable = 30W. Where's the other 70W going? You need either more voltage and/or more current.

 

The other part I have a problem with is reaching 100% quickly. 50%, no problem, but it's the top part that is slow to fill up. I think the article is making it easy to confuse two different standards, while it is focusing on Quick Charge 5 specifically. As far as I can see. QC5 does not have a 100% charge time claim. Only 0-50% in 5 minutes, which is more plausible.

 

It's still rather crazy to think about. A standard charge applies current at the same as the battery's rated capacity e.g. you'd put in up to 4.5A if you have a 4500mAh battery. At that rate, you'd expect it to take somewhere over an hour to fully charge. In part due to losses, in part because the top bit of capacity is slower as you switch from constant current to constant voltage mode.

 

You want 50% in 5 minutes, that scales to about 6x faster than above, and this can be done within the constant current region so is attainable in theory. Instead of sending 4.5A to that battery, it is now 27A. This has to be at or above the battery nominal voltage, so taking 4.7V as typical that works out around 127W. So the "100W+" seems the right ball park to achieve this. At this point I should mention, there's two parts to charging here. One is getting power from outside to the battery charging circuit. The other is getting power from the charging circuit to the battery. I'm talking about the latter, but I suspect QC5 is more about the former. Expect some losses in the conversion, and it might be efficiency gains in that conversion when they talk about reducing temperatures.

 

If your battery charge level is low, this is doable. I'm not up to speed enough on battery technology to comment further on potential risks to battery life if this rate of charge is used regularly.

 

De-rating the battery capacity might be one way to achieve better charge performance, in a similar way to over-provisioning a SSD. Taking the 4500mAh rated capacity again, make the battery actually 6000mAh peak, but reference 4500mAh as the 100% mark. You can then hit that point much faster.

 

Random thought: Linus worries too much about fast chargers already, he'll really love this one.

[porina]

While not about QC5, here's an example of fast charge degradation:

 

 

[Windows7ge]

43 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Same here. That's why I charge with a 7 watt charger during the night, a USB cable from my pob during the day (is needed) and only use a quick charger as an emergency charger which is rarely used. 

I was an idiot and damaged the Micro USB connector on my phone (not purposefully) and now quick charging is just broken. It only does slow charging but I'm not salty about it because of this exact reason.

[Zodiark1593]

2 hours ago, DeScruff said:

I wonder how fast is "fast enough" for most people. Honestly for me getting from ~20-30% to 85% in half an hour is more then good enough.
Thats ether the "Wake up and plug in my phone before leaving for work" or the "plug it in to the car charger while driving to work"

Most times, I don’t even need a fast charger, or even a full battery charge. I use the standard 1A Apple charger with my phone. 70% is more than sufficient to get me through the day. 
 

I’ve a fast charger in the car if I need some juice in a hurry. Generally, if I need a fast charger, I’m going to be away from home, so having a fast charger in the car just in case (or for power outages because California fires) is good to have. I don’t need a fast charger at home. 

[DildorTheDecent]

2 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

I was an idiot and damaged the Micro USB connector on my phone (not purposefully) and now quick charging is just broken. It only does slow charging but I'm not salty about it because of this exact reason.

I think that might be the issue with my S7 Edge oddly enough. It used to fast charge and now it doesn't.

[Windows7ge]

2 minutes ago, DildorTheDecent said:

I think that might be the issue with my S7 Edge oddly enough. It used to fast charge and now it doesn't.

If you plug it into a computer does it respond for transferring files or does it only charge? I think that's what makes quick charging work with the original charger. It negotiates over the data lines and I think that's what I broke with my carelessness.

[williamcll]

What they need instead is interchangeable batteries so I can charge two or more at the same time.

[Guest]

7 hours ago, Mateyyy said:

Is it just me or does pumping 120W through your phone sound kind of sketchy?

Can’t wait to plug my phone into a Tesla charger.

[LAwLz]

8 hours ago, mr moose said:

It's been a long time since I studied this stuff (so long that my diploma doesn't exist anymore),  but as far as I am aware battery chemistry has limits imposed by physics,  no amount of smart electronics and wiring will change that. 

Here is a good article about how fast charging in modern smartphones work.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15834/lion-semi-how-highefficiency-ics-enable-fastcharging

 

 

8 hours ago, porina said:

Something doesn't add up here. It might just be a badly written article. It mentions you have a "standard" 3A cable, and "double" the voltage. USB basic voltage is 5V, so double that is 10V, with a 3A rated cable = 30W. Where's the other 70W going? You need either more voltage and/or more current.

Haven't read the VentureBeat article but Quick Charge 5 can do above 20V, and quite a few "standard" cables can do 5A. So that's where the 100 watt number comes from.

But that number is only true if the phone has two battery cells, which allows it to handle twice as high voltage while charging. The issue with this is that you trade overall battery capacity (so a similarly sized two cell battery holds slightly less charge than a single cell battery) for faster charging.

I think some OPPO phones have used dual cell battery before and as a result they can "only" practically use about 98% of their advertised capacity.

[mr moose]

11 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Here is a good article about how fast charging in modern smartphones work.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15834/lion-semi-how-highefficiency-ics-enable-fastcharging

 

Having a quick read,  that article talks mainly about the power management stages.  Which is fine as that's a hurdle to overcome in it's own right, But it seems to underpin my understanding by pointing out that fast charging will cause battery deterioration faster.  It seems there is very little that can be done to over come that barring the use of a different type of cell (i.e energy v power). 

 

 

[jagdtigger]

9 hours ago, porina said:

I'm not up to speed enough on battery technology to comment further on potential risks to battery life if this rate of charge is used regularly.

The recommended max charge current is 1C (C being the capacity). Charging a 4,5 Ah battery with 27 A is 6C. So yeah, expect some very rapid degradation. Not to mention where they are going to put conductors in nowadays needlessly thin phones that can handle 27 amps without melting down......

[porina]

8 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

The recommended max charge current is 1C (C being the capacity). Charging a 4,5 Ah battery with 27 A is 6C. So yeah, expect some very rapid degradation. Not to mention where they are going to put conductors in nowadays needlessly thin phones that can handle 27 amps without melting down......

Yup, I picked that number because if you want 50% in 5 minutes, that's how much faster you need to push those electrons around. If the battery charge is low enough that you can put 50% of charge in within the constant current zone, it might not be too bad.

 

On the current, my thinking was this is a problem in two parts. The external power does not directly reach the battery. As I type this I realise what I'm saying. Regardless how you get the power from outside to the phone (presumably at higher voltage, lower current), converting that much power within the phone before feeding it to the battery isn't going to be small. Power was never my strong point in electronics. How small can a 100W-class DC-DC converter get? I'm assuming a linear regulator is going to be too inefficient.

[D13H4RD]

Will it though? 

 

With current battery technology, its lifespan is gonna be affected more significantly