Innovative Tech Abounds at Mobile World Congress 2024

Mobile World Congress (MWC) is a major showcase for wireless technologies, and this year’s just-concluded show was no exception. While many think of the show as a vehicle to display the latest wireless phones, it is far more than that, as MWC exhibits many of the under-the-hood technologies that go into these phones as well as other wireless devices and systems.

Here is a sampling of the more interesting announcements from MWC 2024.

Better Vision Sensors for Mobile Phones

Last Fall, Prophesee SA, demonstrated an advanced vision sensor for mobile devices and edge AI applications. At this year’s MWC, Prophesee, through its collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies, announced that the technology has reached the production stage. During MWC, a live demo showcased Prophesee’s native compatibility with premium Snapdragon® mobile platforms, bringing the speed, efficiency, and quality of neuromorphic-enabled vision to cameras in mobile devices.

Prophesee’s event-based Metavision sensors and AI are optimized for use with Snapdragon platforms. brings motion blur cancellation and overall image quality to meet the most challenging scenarios faced by conventional frame-based RGB sensors, fast-moving and low-light scenes. The sensors change the paradigm in traditional image capture by focusing only on changes in a scene, pixel by pixel, continuously, at extreme speeds.

High-performance event-based deblurring is achieved by synchronizing Prophesee’s event-based sensor. The system then fills the gaps between and inside the frames with microsecond events to extract pure motion information and repair motion blur algorithmically.

Intel's Focus On AI On Display Again

Intel has been on an AI kick and continued that theme at the Mobile World Congress with its latest vPro enterprise processor platform. The platform leverages the enhanced features of Intel® Core™ Ultra processors with available built-in Intel® Arc™ GPUs.

The Core Ultra processors feature dedicated AI acceleration capability across the CPU, GPU, and the new neural processing unit (NPU). As for the vPro benefits, Intel said users should expect up to 47% better office application productivity with new Core Ultra-powered PCs vs. a three-year-old PC. The company also said vPro supports Intel Threat Detection Technology, which leverages the new NPU to improve the efficiency of anomaly detection and reduce power. Meanwhile, the new Intel Silicon Security Engine authenticates system firmware to help safeguard against cyber threats below the operating system.

In terms of manageability, vPro features Intel Device Discovery, which allows cloud-based tools to receive the information they need to take appropriate actions on a given PC. Also, Intel Device Health with VMware and Eclypsium helps IT organizations gain visibility into fleet patching requirements and deliver end-to-end device management.

Intel's VPro enterprise processor. (INTEL)

Sustainability is In Too

As in other markets, wireless network technology providers are increasingly looking at sustainability to save on resources and provide a business advantage. Greenerwave, the French deeptech startup specializing in the control of electromagnetic waves, announced version 2.0 of its reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS).

Greenerwave has created passive and dynamic surfaces that can redirect millimetric waves to a specific device while adjusting their position in real-time. Based on a more energy-efficient new component, this version promises a ten-fold reduction in energy consumption and drastically lower costs compared with RIS 1.0.

Greenerwave believes this RIS will soon give operators access to an agnostic, more cost-effective and energy-efficient solution allowing them to optimize their network quality without having to deploy multiple antennas. For users, it will guarantee a steady broadband connection even in the densest areas.

GaN Continues to Evolve

With GaN continuing to find its way into power amplifiers for wireless infrastructure and handsets, Finwave Semiconductor, Inc., demonstrated its advanced GaN-on-Si technology and high-power switches. The enhancement-mode (E-mode) 200mm GaN-on-Si transistor technology exhibits less than 1 ohm-mm on-resistance, greater than 700 mS/mm transconductance, and negligible current collapse with power-added-efficiency (PAE) as high as 60% over operating frequencies from 8 GHz to 26 GHz. The technology can operate at Vdd of 5V or lower, demonstrating its potential for efficient power amplifiers for 6G FR3 frequency band (7-24GHz) and FR2 mmWave band infrastructure, CPEs, and handset applications.

AI Meets 5G

Wind River®, which develops software for mission-critical intelligent systems, showcased with Encora, a digital engineering services company, advanced AI automation of 5G Open RAN (Radio Access Network) operations at the Mobile World Congress.

The companies jointly demonstrated an AI LLM interacting with live deployed cloud infrastructure representative of a core-to-edge service provider network. The demonstration allows live querying via the AI of various network elements, live cooperative debugging with the AI of alarms and configuration issues, and live interaction with Kubernetes systems.

The demonstration shows, with normal human language interaction, a conversational ability to query the live underlying systems via API integration with the AI, enabling the user to converse with the AI to discover, analyze, and repair complex problems in a highly distributed system, such as a 5G Open RAN deployment.