Huawei unveils cutting-edge inventions at innovation event
Huawei has unveiled a range of new inventions as part of its biennial Top Ten Inventions Awards at the Broadening the Innovation Landscape 2022 forum.
The forum is held at the company's Shenzhen headquarters, and the award is designed to recognise creations that could broaden into a new series of products, become significant commercial features of existing products, or foster major value for the company and the industry.
The wide range of awarded inventions includes an adder neural network that dramatically reduces power consumption and circuit area and a cutting-edge optical iris that offers a unique identifier for optical fibres designed to assist carriers in managing their network resources, distributing broadband in a more time and cost-efficient way.
The announcement comes in the context of intellectual property rights, Which Huawei says are crucial to protect and share sensibly within the tech ecosystem.
"Protecting IP is key to protecting innovation," Huawei chief legal officer Song Liuping says.
"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."
By the end of 2021, Huawei held over 110,000 active patents spanning more than 45,000 patent families.
Further, the company has more granted patents than any other Chinese company.
It has also filed the most patent applications with the EU Patent Office, ranking fifth in new patents granted in the United States.
For five straight years, Huawei has sat in first place worldwide in terms of Patent Cooperation Treaty applications.
"Huawei is constantly changing itself, and constantly showcasing to the world the value of IP from China," International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property's China chapter president Tian Lipu says.
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.
"In the past five years, more than two billion smartphones have been licensed to Huawei's 4G/5G patents. And for cars, about eight million connected vehicles licensed to Huawei patents are being delivered to the consumers every year," Fan says.
In addition, Huawei is taking a proactive approach to patent licensing by working with licensing administration companies to provide 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 adds.
Fan also says that the company is discussing establishing a new patent pool to simplify industry access to Huawei's patents for Wi-Fi devices worldwide.
Moreover, Huawei is in talks regarding joint licensing programs for 5G patents with licensing experts and other leading industry patentees.
"We look forward to seeing Huawei continue to take part in high-level global competition with innovation at its core." World Intellectual Property Organization Office China director Liu Hua says.
Former European Patent Office vice president Manuel Desantes notes that given the vast number of changes in the world these days, what matters most is no longer the number of registered patents or inventions.
"The IP system should assure that the creations that merit protection are those that bring actual value," Desantes says.
This event was the third Huawei has hosted that centres around innovation and IP, and the company invests more than 10% of its sales revenue into research and development.
