Top Tier Technology LLC / Independence, Kentucky
Extra Life™ is a firmware-level power-continuity architecture. A masking module carves a defined percentage of the battery's usable charge and holds it as a protected reserve, so a device that has gone dark can still transmit its location when an authenticated request arrives.
Cell capacity, as the architecture divides it
Never touched and never altered. Extra Life sits entirely above it.
Carved proactively from the usable band, not scavenged from charge left over at shutdown.
Masked so the operating system continues to read a normal zero to one hundred percent scale.
Architecture
The sequence below is the mechanism the issued claims are directed to.
A masking module carves a defined percentage of the battery's usable charge and holds it as a protected reserve. The carve is proactive. Nothing is scavenged from whatever charge happens to remain when the device shuts down.
The reserve is invisible to the operating system, which continues to read and report a normal full scale. The reserve is held above the battery management system's safety floor, which the architecture never touches or alters.
Activation is restricted to pre-authorized emergency contacts. The patented architecture provides for authenticated remote activation over L-band and IoT satellite links, encrypted SMS, cloud HTTPS, or a paired device.
A lightweight micro-OS beneath the main operating system spends the reserve on GPS location transmission and an adaptive rescue beacon that throttles its transmission rate as the reserve drains, extending the window in which the device remains locatable.
Design characteristics
The architecture is implemented in firmware. It does not require a new cell chemistry, a larger pack, or a silicon respin.
The reserve is carved from the usable band above the BMS floor. Existing protection thresholds are left exactly as the manufacturer set them.
Issued claims are directed to adjusting the reserve threshold based on usage patterns, environmental factors including temperature, and location-based risk assessment.
The beacon throttles its own rate against the remaining reserve rather than transmitting at a fixed interval until the reserve is gone.
Portfolio
The international specification is directed to a broader class of devices than handsets alone:
Origin
Extra Life came out of being lost, unreachable, and holding a device that had nothing left to give. Every part of that phone still worked. The radio worked. The GPS worked. There was simply no power left to run them, and no way for anyone to reach in and ask where it was.
The architecture exists to answer that. A small, deliberately reserved portion of the charge, held back from the start and spent only when someone who has been pre-authorized asks for it.
Licensing
Extra Life™ is available for licensing to device manufacturers, chipset vendors, and platform developers. Top Tier Technology LLC holds the portfolio and intends to retain ownership of the underlying intellectual property.
If your organization is working on power management, emergency connectivity, or device survivability, I would welcome a conversation.