New York ? For decades, electronics designers have struggled to tailor the latest concoction in silicon chips and integrated circuits to the power limitations of the lowly battery.

“They’re holding us back big time,” said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future. Had batteries advanced at the pace of the computer processor, he said, “a double-A cell would contain more energy than a tactical nuke.”

Other than a few devices like weak solar cells and mechanical cranking devices, there isn’t an alternate portable power source. Batteries are it.

“There’s not much you can do about it,” said Boris Donskoy, who designs portable electronic instruments for InHand Electronics Inc., of Rockville, Md. “There are basic limitations in physics.”

Researchers talk of batteries being replaced at some point by portable fuel cells and tiny jet engines  or a new battery made of a better combination of chemicals.

Until then, we’re stuck with a power source whose origins date to 1859, when the first lead acid battery was made in France.

The same basic energy storage concept still fuels the 4 billion disposable batteries sold each year in the United States. And vestiges of bygone days infuse the industry vernacular.

Rayovac engineer Jim Pilarzyk, an engineer at No. 3 battery seller Rayovac Corp., said his industry has no hope of keeping up with fast-morphing computer processors, which double in speed and halve in size every 18 months.

A 5 percent improvement in power capacity every two years is about the best battery scientists can manage, he said.

“The battery industry is somewhat limited,” Pilarzyk said. “They’re analog devices in a digital world.”

For all their shortcomings, comparing batteries with computers isn’t fair.

Batteries’ roots lie in chemists’ beakers. Computer speed is pushed by advances in manufacturing, and the ability to make circuits and transistors smaller and smaller.

“A battery isn’t a microprocessor,” said Donald Sadoway, a battery researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s a chemical device. It observes different scaling laws.”

For designers of portable electronics who yearn to shrink their gadgets and add gobs of features, battery power is the choke point that stunts their ambitions.

“The last 20 years have been aimed at designing around the limitations of batteries,” Saffo said.

If the device needs to be small, it won’t run long. If it needs to run long, it can’t be small  or have power-guzzling add-ons like a fast processor or a color display.

“When I want to design something, my first question is, ‘How much power does it consume?’ There’s a big trade-off between size, power consumption and cost,” Donskoy said.

While chemists and engineers struggle to eke out a little more power  giving batteries thinner skins, a less inert material  consumers locked into buying and discarding batteries wonder whether there’s a conspiracy. Do manufacturers refuse to make a better battery?

“It’s not economic for battery manufacturers to develop new technology,” said Bruce Rittenhouse, president of Electronic Automation Inc., a Grand Rapids, Mich. company that repairs industrial electronics. “Why do it? They want to sell you batteries every month, not every six years.”

Lew Urry, a scientist with Energizer Holdings Inc., discounts that notion. With Energizer and its rival Duracell leapfrogging each other, a slowdown in innovation gives the other company boasting rights.

“You can’t afford to let that happen,” said Urry, 76, who helped invent Eveready’s first alkaline battery.