Norm Allen disagrees. "Business is growing 30 percent per year," said Allen, president of PowerSmart (Shelton, Conn.). "We've penetrated 70 percent of all computer batteries, and it goes 'north' from there."

Most estimates of market size invoke the projections of consultant Hideo Takeshita, formerly with Nomura Research Institute Ltd. and now with the Institute for Information Technology. It was Takeshita who called my attention to fragmentation of the computer battery at one of the GigaGroup's annual Power conferences. That fragmenation ultimately drove Duracell-Power Smart's former parent and a framer of the Smart Battery Specification-out of the market.

Takeshita's presentation at a February gathering of the Smart Battery Implementers Forum wasn't particularly upbeat: While the total Li-ion battery market is expanding in volume, the smart battery electronics accounts for 28 percent of a smart battery's costs-and price competition among cell suppliers is brutal. The high costs of SBS implementation may make their business unprofitable.

But that doesn't dampen the enthusiasm of the remaining smart battery IC suppliers. "There are 2.7 billion cells coming out of Japan this year-400 million Li-ion batteries. Every one of them will have a smart battery IC," insisted Dave Heacock, business manager for battery management products at Texas Instruments. TI inherited smart battery IC pioneer BenchMarq with its 1999 acquisition of Unitrode Corp. Heacock has reason to smile: Smart batteries will be in roughly 70 percent of the 21 million portable computers shipped this year, according to Takeshita. More than half of those will have BenchMarq ICs.

The market is growing about 30 percent, Heacock said, and efforts to increase cell phone talk time will broaden the market for smart battery ICs. "Higher capacity means taking capability right to the envelope," he said.