There have been numerous incidents of explosions in mobile
systems recently. Batteries seem to be the focus whenever one of
these unfortunate events happens. The world seems happy and
satisfied that the offending battery has been recalled. That may
work for CNN, but it's not good enough for the engineering
community. Mobile systems have complex power-management schemes
that have two conflicting requirements. One is saving battery
life by quickly switching to "standby" states that are
inoperational; the other is the need to apply various degrees of
heat control as temperature rises, ranging from clock gating to
fan activation to full shutdown. This is the cause of trouble,
for you need the hardware (and software) to be working to
activate these heat control measures, irrespective of what state
the system is in. Unfortunately, the system is often
dysfunctional enough for deadlock/runaway conditions to occur.
The truth is that mobile systems have always been volatile with
a mass of explosive material (the batter