5G Technology the Digital Artery Pumping Fresh Blood and Innovations for All Sectors of the Industry
Gathered today at the COMPUTEX Forum, guest speakers representing leading figures of the industry talked about the development of critical technologies that would serve to bolster innovations throughout the industry.
The forum is one of the most highly anticipated events of the annual COMPUTEX show, organized by the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA). Due to the local pandemic, the show is being held digitally through the #COMPUTEXVirtual platform.
Invited speakers from Qualcomm, Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), WIN Semiconductors, Siemens Ltd. Taiwan and FarEasTone Telecommunication (FET) spoke on 5G networks and its relevance to technological innovations, both in the present, and in the future.
Qualcomm Technologies Senior Vice President and General Manager of Mobile, Compute, and Infrastructure Alex Katouzian said that the development of the 5G network is starting to change PC user expectations, expecting constant connectivity and a user experience comparable to using a smartphone.
While touching on the development of the millimeter wave tech, which can allocate more bandwidth to deliver higher-quality videos, multimedia content and other services faster, Qualcomm recognized that hardware computation capabilities must also keep up with the pace of 5G network development.
While 5G networks are seeing commercial deployment worldwide, the majority of its growth have been during the pandemic period, a development that underscores the shift in lifestyle of Human society working from home, necessitating faster networks to carry the data to work offices, school portals, data centers and edge applications.
QCT President Mike Yang opined that this “3rd convergence” of Information Technology (IT) and Communication Technology (CT) brings in new players that provide important elements – open, virtualized, cloud-native and software-defined – to help drive this transformation and build 5G networks.
These elements of change brought about by new players have made the 5G network more adaptable for application to other fields, Vehicles to everything (V2X), Telemedicine, and more.
Industrial 4.0 and smart manufacturing take advantage of the network’s development, using its high bandwidth and low latency to link factory machines together through the Internet of Things (IoT).
“Industrial 4.0, IoT, smart manufacturing, those are the future of manufacturing,” Siemens President and CEO Erdal Elver said, adding that the world is changing, and these changes, be it the pandemic or climate change, are forcing us to optimize things through technology.
Siemens’ utilization of 5G networks along with the concept of the Grid Edge highlights yet another possibility for 5G application – innovations for the national power grid that could help conserve, or track the usage of, national. power.
Perhaps most relevant to the times, FET’s development of Telemedicine platforms to provide a solution – and also groundwork – bridging the medical gap between urban and rural townships in Taiwan using the 5G network again highlights the network’s qualities to bring about technological innovation.
FET President Chee Ching also noted that while the company has laid down solid groundwork to build on with the development of the platform, it would need to collaborate with partners to further develop the platform, especially as more Internet of Medical Things wearables are developed and become connected to the platform.
With more data to be processed, the platform will have to enhance its backend compute capabilities or risk letting the potential of the 5G network go to waste.
WIN Semiconductors General Manager YC Wang came at the issue of 5G networks from a different perspective, gauging the network’s strength not from its potential for application, but rather from the material make-up of the devices using the network.
Cisco VNI index shows global mobile data traffic grew at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 46% (2016-2021). Based on this calculation, ten years from now we would see a 44 times increase of data traffic compared to today.
“This calculation shows an unprecedented stringent performance requirement is needed for the next-gen network, and perhap requires a sub-Terahertz device to provide sufficient bandwidth,” Wang said.
Compound semiconductors are expected to have a large role to play in future tech as innovative emerging applications require enormous frequency bandwidth and high-performance smart sensors, Wang added.
