By monitoring software applications from within the operating system, BatteryMAX is able to reduce the time taken to detect idle behavior from minutes to microseconds.
The technique was named Dynamic Idle Detection and includes halting, or stopping the CPU for periods of just a few microseconds until a hardware event occurs to restart it.
[4] Despite taking an early lead and having the protection of a patent, BatteryMAX did not enjoy significant commercial success having been sidelined after the disarray that followed the integration of Digital Research into Novell, Inc. in 1991.
[5] It can either be linked into the DR-DOS operating system BIOS or loaded dynamically using the CONFIG.SYS DEVICE directive, overloading the built-in default driver.
Using the device driver concept, BatteryMAX can be integrated with hardware-related power management facilities, which might be provided by the underlying hardware, including interfacing with APM or ACPI system BIOSes.
If the time is outside the specified limit, the driver assumes that some processing has occurred in between polling the keyboard, and allows application execution to resume without switching power states.
Programs written for single-tasking operating systems such as MS-DOS/PC DOS can go into endless loops until interrupted; for example when waiting for a user to press a key.
09-354 in the United States District Court D. Delaware, against defendants Acer, Dell, Gateway and Lenovo and on 18 September 2009 filed civil action No.
09-704 against Apple, and Toshiba The actions alleged infringement of several U.S. patents that they owned relating to software power management under operating system control.
Seattle law firm Perkins Coie, acting for the defendants, discovered BatteryMAX and Gross's idle detection patent during a prior art search.
Gross provided evidence in his expert report that he, not Fung, had invented software power management under operating system control and cited the Idle Detection patent and the existence of BatteryMAX as proof of this.
St. Clair filed a motion to exclude opinions concerning BatteryMAX, in an attempt to have Gross's expert report dismissed, but on 29 March 2013, the district court denied St. Clair's motion declaring Gross's testimony for the defendants as admissible,[7][non-primary source needed] stating that "The Court agrees with Defendants that there is sufficient corroborating evidence that BatteryMAX was available to the public prior to the Fung patents' priority date.