Huawei recently announced its latest inventions that will revolutionize AI, 5G, and user experience. The announcement was made as part of Huawei’s biennial "Top Ten Inventions" Awards at the "Broadening the Innovation Landscape 2022" forum held at its Shenzhen headquarters.
These inventions or patented technologies have the potential to create new product series, become important commercial features of existing products, and generate considerable value for the company and the industry.
Below are some of the inventions announced during the event:
- The all-new Adder Neural Network that significantly reduces computing power consumption and circuit area by 70% while ensuring accuracy.
- The "optical iris" that provides a unique identifier for optical fibers, designed to help carriers manage their network resources, cutting time and costs associated with broadband deployment.
- The Massive MIMO In-N-Out addresses the major challenges for indoor and outdoor 5G deployment. In outdoor scenarios, BladeAAUs help customers simplify 5G network deployment and ensure optimal 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G network performance. While indoors, Distributed MIMO greatly improves 5G network capacity and user experience.
- The LinkTurbo and Hyperhold, a device acceleration bundle. With this invention, Huawei’s smartphones can deliver smooth user experience under all network and memory usage conditions. LinkTurbo significantly improves the concurrent download rate, and reduces game delays and video buffering time, while Hyperhold greatly expands the available memory, improves basic read-write performance.
- The ‘Kite’ for Core Networks - this invention allows carriers to deploy remote core networks, or ‘kite networks’, for their business clients from different industries, meeting their stringent reliability and security requirements.
The announcement came in the context of intellectual property rights, the protection and sharing of which Huawei believes is critical to the tech ecosystem.
Speaking at the event, Huawei’s Chief Legal Officer, Song Liuping, said: “Protecting IP is key to protecting innovation."
"We are eager to license our patents and technologies to share our innovations with the world. This will help broaden the innovation landscape, drive our industry forward, and advance technology for everyone," he added.
By the end of 2021, Huawei held more than 110,000 active patents across over 45,000 patent families. It has more granted patents than any other Chinese company has filed with the EU Patent Office, and ranked fifth in terms of new patents granted in the United States. For five straight years, Huawei has ranked No. 1 worldwide in terms of Patent Cooperation Treaty applications.
Huawei filed its first patent application in China back in 1995, its first patent application in the US in 1999, and its first patent application in Europe in 2011. In 2008, the World Intellectual Property Organization listed Huawei as No. 1 in terms of number of patent applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) for the first time.
Alan Fan, Head of Huawei’s IPR Department, said the value of Huawei patents has seen wide recognition in the industry, especially in mainstream standards such as cellular technology, Wi-Fi, and audio/video codecs.
He further added that in the past five years, more than two billion smartphones have been licensed to Huawei's 4G/5G patents. For cars, about eight million connected vehicles licensed to Huawei patents are being delivered to the consumers every year.
Huawei is also working actively with patent license administration companies in offering "one-stop" licenses for mainstream standards.
"Over 260 companies—accounting for one billion devices—have obtained Huawei's HEVC patent licenses through a patent pool," Fan said. He added that the company is in discussions to establish a new patent pool to give the industry “quick access” to Huawei’s patents for Wi-Fi devices worldwide.
Huawei is also discussing joint licensing programs for 5G patents with licensing experts and other leading industry patentees.
This marked the third innovation and IP-themed event Huawei has hosted on its innovation practices. Every year, Huawei invests over 10% of its sales revenue into R&D.
In terms of R&D expenditure, Huawei ranked second in the 2021 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. In 2021, the company increased its R&D investment to CNY142.7 billion, representing 22.4% of its total revenue. Over the past decade, Huawei’s total R&D investment surpassed CNY845 billion.
