Pocket-sized progress: Smartphones and NSF innovations

There's a good chance you're reading this story on a smartphone. Every day, more than 90% of the U.S. population reaches for these small mobile computers that have transformed modern communications.

Smartphones provide round-the-clock connections to friends and family. They enable access to vast amounts of information — more than half of internet traffic is due to mobile phones. They have revolutionized commerce — online sales via smartphones accounted for $360 billion in 2021 and are forecasted to grow to $856 billion by 2027, according to industry analysts.

Much of this would not be possible without technologies that trace their origins to the U.S. National Science Foundation and other federal research agencies. Along with broader innovations that are key elements of the mobile connected world, such as the internet, search engines and cybersecurity, NSF funded early research into technologies that are major elements of smartphones — touch screens and lithium-ion batteries. 

Credit: National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

The power to move

The freedom to unplug from a power source and take a smartphone nearly anywhere is due to the lithium-ion batteries inside these devices. These light, adaptable power sources have been used in consumer electronics since the 1990s, and NSF support dating back to the 1970s played a vital role in funding research and development, including improving performance, safety and sustainability.  

Two NSF-supported researchers played critical roles in the development of technologies that enabled the development of lithium-ion batteries. NSF has supported the work of John B. Goodenough of The University of Texas at Austin and M. Stanley Whittingham of the State University of New York at Binghamton over 30 years. Most of Goodenough's NSF-supported work focused on magnets and superconductors. Whittingham, also the recipient of numerous NSF grants, discovered that it is possible to slide lithium ions in and out between the layers of an electrode, an instrumental finding in the development of lithium batteries.

In 2019, Goodenough and Whittingham shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Akira Yoshino of Asahi Kasei Corp. of Japan for the development of lithium-ion batteries.  

NSF continues to advance the technologies behind lithium-ion batteries today, including supporting research on solid-state batteries, which offer the potential for smaller, lighter and safer energy storage solutions; funding projects to investigate new battery materials, such as alternative cathode materials and electrolytes, and aluminum materials for safer and more durable batteries; and investing in research on battery recycling technologies to address the growing demand for resources and to promote sustainability. 

Credit: Juliana Freire and Claudio Silva, University of Utah

Helping connect the world

Along with elements of smartphones themselves, NSF has supported the development of the networks that help smartphone users connect to each other and to businesses and organizations around the world.

The U.S. wireless industry is a significant contributor to the U.S. economy, with a market size of $825 billion in 2025, supporting approximately 4.5 million jobs. All of this relies on advances in wireless communications technologies made possible by NSF-funded research. One such advance is a discovery made in 1992 that enables wireless devices to simultaneously receive multiple input and multiple output data streams. This technology dramatically increases the performance of wireless systems, allowing both higher data rates and wider coverage areas and underlies today's wireless (WiFi and 4G/5G cellular) networks. In addition, this breakthrough was the basis for two companies that pioneered 4G wireless communications and WiMax technologies and advanced the wireless communications sector over the last decade.

As demand for faster, more affordable and secure wireless communications grows, NSF-supported research will offer new insights critical for future technologies, like 6G (and beyond) cellular networks.

Internet connectivity enables smartphones to access data, storage and computation on servers, taking advantage of capabilities that require more resources than are available on smartphones. Underlying these cloud services are virtualized data centers that provide virtual machines hosting computation and applications from a large number of distributed users. In 2007, NSF partnered with IBM and Google to provide computer science students with the skills to develop cloud applications. In 2008, NSF created the Cluster Exploratory Initiative to provide NSF-funded researchers access to software and services running on the Google-IBM cluster. Ongoing research funded by NSF is exploring ways to improve communication time between smart devices and the cloud.

NSF has also funded research to protect national and personal security, enabling the commerce that travels along these networks today. Cybersecurity is critical for safeguarding the nation's digital infrastructure and ensuring the safety and privacy of personal data, as smartphones are increasingly used for activities such as shopping and banking.  

Credit: Courtesy of Duolingo

Shaping the future of smartphones

Another technology that holds the potential to drive smartphone utility to even greater heights is artificial intelligence. Since the 1960s, NSF has been pivotal in AI advancements like neural networks (computation models inspired by the human brain), reinforcement learning (a type of machine learning where an AI system learns from trial and error) and the language-learning app Duolingo. NSF has also backed research breakthroughs in AI that laid the foundation for technologies Americans use every day, including digital assistants like Alexa and Siri, Face ID, image generators and chatbots like ChatGPT.

NSF also remains active in supporting research that can improve the physical attributes of smartphones, such as the development of graphene-based components. This form of the carbon material graphite is just one-atom thick and has been hailed as a wonder material. Strong, light and nearly transparent, graphene has the potential to make smartphone displays ultrathin, transparent, flexible and virtually indestructible.  

The history and the future of smartphones and the economic boon they have generated are intimately tied to NSF-funded research, and the evidence is at your fingertips.