OFC 2018 Theme: 400 Gbps

Huawei's Chip Projects Front and Center at Analyst Summit (HAS2019)

4/22/2019

Huawei hosted 700 analysts and media participants in Shenzhen China last week to attend its annual analyst summit, nick-named HAS2019. The company's high-level message was simple - the company is an innovator and is moving down the stack into semiconductors and is partnering with and funding university projects to develop basic research. This year’s message was different from than the prior-year meeting, but several transformative events have occurred between this meeting and the prior year's, most notably the 2Q18 shipment ban on ZTE, the US / China trade dispute and US efforts to thwart Huawei’s participation in the 5G infrastructure of its allies. Interestingly, during HAS2019, the Apple and Qualcomm announced their chip-supply and patent settlement, Samsung announced its foldable phone (which has been met with criticism), and Ericsson & Swisscom announced that the operator went live with its 5G network. All three of non-Huawei events highlighted the importance of Huawei’s chips and innovation announcements.

Huawei Innovation 2.0 presentation slide at HAS2019

Huawei's Kirin 980 HiAI smartphone chip at HAS2019

Huawei HAS2019 presentation about Moore's Law and Shannon Limit

Huawei OptiXtreme H6 oDSP for optical transmission at HAS2019

Huawei ARM server TaiShan presented at HAS2019

The company made announcements in its main keynote presentations on day one about seven different chip projects delivered recently or planned shortly. Chip-level is unusual for what are typically high-level presentations from a keynote-level presentation. These chips (seen in accompanying pictures) are:

Ascend 310/910. Artificial Intelligence (AI) chip for cloud (leads to its Data Center Ethernet Switch iLossLess cloud service)
OptiXtreme H6 oDSP. Optical transmission Digital Signal Processor (DSP).
Hi 1822. FC/IP chip used for products including Solid State Drives (SSDs)
Atlas 200 AI acceleration for AI computing intended for September 2019 announcements at Huawei Connect
Tiangang 5G Basestation chipset
Balong chip series intended for 5G smartphones and other Customer Premises Equipment (CPE)
Kungpeng ARM chips for computing

Huawei Ascend NPU / AI chip and Kunpeng ARM chips at HAS2019

Huawei highlights its 5G 40 commercial contracts and 70,000 basestation shipments at HAS2019

Huawei Tiangang 5G base station chip at HAS2019

Huawei Balong 5000 chip for smartphones at HAS2019

Huawei 5G baseband, 5G Core and antenna product line at HAS2019

The company shared more details about other chips in breakout sessions on the second and third days of the conference, as well. The point we are making, though, is that upper-level management provided significant detail about semiconductor developments at Huawei. Another relevant semiconductor-related point to make is that the company is de-emphasizing its reliance on Intel-based architecture and instead is focusing on devices such as ARM-based processors, as well as GPU, FPGA and NPU semiconductors.
We would be remiss if we did not mention some of the system-level announcements and observations related to 5G that were made at the HAS2019 conference, which include:

MU-MIMO. Of Huawei’s 70,000 shipments of 5G base stations as of the show, 97% were MU-MIMO based. The company expects MU-MIMO to be deployed not only in urban areas but also in rural areas.
SingleRAN Pro. The company is taking an architectural approach that is different from what some service providers in the world want; it is delivering an integrated product approach where multiple frequencies and base stations are integrated into the same enclosures. This converged approach is different from the architectural approach being promoted by some smaller vendors like Altiostar, Mavenir and Parallel Wireless, which uses the O-RAN standard and features a disaggregation between various components like antenna and base band processing. Huawei’s rationale is that it is less expensive on capital spending and operational spending to use the integrated approach.
Converged Mobile Packet Core. The company plans to have 1H19 commercial availability of its 2G/3G/4G/5G NSA/5G SA packet core system. In slides depicting this product, it prominently features chip systems such as GPU, FPGA, NPU, and ARM but specifically excludes x86 references.
Huawei expects to deliver its first 5G phone in November 2019

Huawei emphasis on NPU, GPU, FPGA and ARM chip components at HAS2019

Huawei Kirin 980 and Balong 5000 7nm 5G chipset for smartphones at HAS2019

even more follow on

0 Comments

Mobile World Congress Americas (MWCa) And AT&T Spark - All About 5G

9/14/2018

0 Comments

We attended Mobile World Congress Americas (MWCa) in Los Angeles, CA this week, as well as the AT&T Spark event in San Francisco. Since 5G is launching first the US, these two events became the public events where significant 5G-related announcements happened.

Verizon. Will launch 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) on October 1 in four markets: Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Sacramento.
AT&T. The company reiterated its own 5G plans (mobile 5G by year-end 2018 in cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, Raleigh, Waco, Houston, Jacksonville, Lousville, New Orleans and San Antonia), plus it made some announcements like that it is beginning 5G-ready CBRS equipment testing (using Samsung CBRS equipment and CommScope as SAS provider). Also, at the Spark event on Monday, the company announced three strategic telecom equipment suppliers, Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung.
T-Mobile. Announced that it had completed a Cisco vEPC system (upgradeable to 5G Core) carrying traffic for 70M users that was from Cisco. It also announced that it signed a $3.5B 5G agreement with Ericsson. This is in addition to the July 30 announcement made earlier with Nokia for $3.5B, as well. Generally, the company has set expectations as recently as September 10 that it will provide nationwide 5G by the year 2020.
Sprint. Announced that it had demonstrated a 5G NR connection of Massive MIMO with Nokia equipment.

Additionally, discussions about spectrum in the US market were very active discussions. Some points we picked up on:

No new mid-band auctions will occur in the US market for another 2-3 years, so this means that new capacity is going to come from LAA (just announced on the iPhone Xs this week, as well) and from CBRS (discussed above).
The "who has the fastest 5G throughput" battle will be won at the millimeter wave. In other words, using millimeter was, speeds as high as 10 Gbps are possible, but with mid-band (1-6 Ghz), where LTE is currently deployed, cannot go much over 2 Gbps. So, to beat the Ookla Speed Test, the mobile operators who deploy mmWave early will get a leg up. However, in order to deploy mmWave, these have to be small-cells that are within 100 meters of users. Since it is so difficult to get real-estate rights and backhaul for small cells, this is going to be a big challenge. Nevertheless, this is how the battle will be won.
T-Mobile's 600 Mhz rollout is now in 1,250 cities. The company will eventually enable 600 Mhz 5G. 600 Mhz should dramatically improve T-Mobile coverage because it is low-band spectrum.

0 Comments

OCP Summit 2018 - Disaggregation Theme Dominates

3/21/2018

0 Comments

The OCP Summit 2018 hit record attendance and we can can summarize the theme as that of continued disaggregation of network/server functions. Examples of demonstrations, presentations and proposals associated with disaggregation are as follows:

Flash/SSD. Project Denali was presented by Microsoft. The idea is it separates SSD controller functions from the flash memory itself, allowing the controller to be modified for different work-loads. This means, essentially, controller semiconductor companies such as Broadcom and Marvell may need to be selling directly to hyperscalers such as Microsoft, as well as to their historical customers - the SSD vendors - such as Western Digital and Samsung, for instance. We believe other hyperscalers have implemented flash unbundling already.
Unbundling of Networking. Facebook showed off its FBOSS, a network operating system. Big Switch demostrated its FRR Open Source BGP, a routing protocol and Google showed off its Controller-based P4 system. There was some levity in this presentation as the hardware upon which the Google system ran was "(not disclosed)" - see accompanying slide.
P4 network layer abstraction and programming environment. Google showed what we believe to be a live, in-production system using P4 to perform route injection and many other functions.
Taking the OCP concept a bit further from the traditional server, storage and switch market, Mojo Networks demonstrated an Edgecore-supplied "OCP Accepted" Wireless LAN Access Point that was running the Mojo AP software and working with the Mojo Networks cloud-managed services offering. This wasn't just a desk unit, the company had 21 live-working Access Points using the OCP concept that powered WiFi to the trade-show floor.

One clear message away from disaggregation was presented and proposed separately both by Facebook and Arista was that for co-packaged optics. Both companies explained that this integration will consume lower power; Arista went so far as to say it would consume 30% lower power on a system-wide basis. There was no clear consensus at the show whether co-packaged optics was going to be a hit; however the power-hungry hyperscalers must certainly be entertaining it.