Chinese telecom giant Huawei has unveiled technological inventions that will revolutionize artificial intelligence (AI), 5G and user experience.
The group announced key inventions in its biennial awards on Wednesday, including “ten best inventions,” at the “Expanding the Innovation Landscape 2022” forum held at its headquarters in Shenzhen, China.
The award is intended to recognise inventions that have the potential to create new product series, become important commercial features of existing products, or generate significant value for the company and the industry.
The inventions awarded at the event are diverse including an adder neural network that dramatically reduces power consumption and circuit area to an “optical iris,” allowing unique identification of optical fibres.
It is also designed to make it easier for operators to manage their network resources, while reducing the time and costs associated with broadband deployment.
The telecoms group’s announcement comes against the backdrop of intellectual property rights, the protection and sharing of which the company believes is essential to the technology ecosystem.
“We must protect intellectual property at all costs to protect innovation,” said Mr. Song Liuping, Huawei’s General Counsel, who added he was enthusiastic about the company’s licensing of its patents and technologies to share its innovations globally.
This should help broaden the innovation landscape, drive the industry forward and advance technology for all, he added.
“Huawei is constantly evolving and showing the world the value of Chinese intellectual property,” said Tian Lipu, president of the China chapter of the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property.
By the end of 2021, Huawei held more than 110,000 active patents across more than 45,000 patent families.
With more patents granted than any other Chinese company, the Group has filed the most patent applications with the European Patent Office and ranked 5th in terms of new patents granted in the US.
With its advanced technological research, the company ranked first in the world in patent applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) for the fifth consecutive year.
Alan Fan, head of Huawei’s IPR department, said that the industry strongly recognises the value of the group’s patents, particularly in mainstream standards such as cellular technology, Wi-Fi and audio/video codecs.
Over the past five years, more than 2 billion smartphones have been licensed for Huawei’s 4G/5G patents.
The company is actively working with patent licensing companies to offer “one-stop” licensing for key standards.
“Regarding cars, about 8 million connected vehicles protected by Huawei patents are delivered to consumers every year,” Fan said.
The group is discussing joint licensing programmes for 5G patents with leading industry experts and patent holders.
“More than 260 companies, totalling 1 billion devices, have licensed Huawei’s HEVC patents through a patent pool,” he continued, adding that the company is in talks to establish a new patent pool “to give the industry quick access to [Huawei’s] patents for Wi-Fi devices worldwide.”
Manuel Desantes, former vice-president of the European Patent Office, said that “the intellectual property system must ensure that the creations that deserve protection are those that provide real value.”
Every year, Huawei reinvests more than 10 percent of its revenues in research and development. In recent years, the company has invested more than 20 billion yuan in basic research each year.
In 2021, the company increased its investment in research and development (to CNY 142.7 billion), accounting for 22.4 percent of its total revenue.
Over the past decade, total investment has exceeded CNY 845 billion.
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