Funding Sets Stage for Mechanical Engineering Smartphone Spinoff to Commercialize
The company has developed a new method of cooling smartphones, Y.C. Lee, president and CEO, told BizWest. When phones overheat, it causes them to not operate well, and can actually be harmful to the user. Lee said that if an alternate-reality headset with a smartphone overheats, it can cause a small sunburn on the person’s face.
Most smartphones use aluminum casing to help dissipate the heat from the processing chip, Lee said. But because of the thickness of the aluminum, about 0.8 millimeters, many smartphone manufacturers are moving to glass, which is thinner but doesn’t dissipate heat as well.
Lee and his colleague Ronggui Yang have developed a technology that is both thin — 0.25 millimeters — and is more effective at keeping the new glass-based models of phones from overheating.