U.S. companies allowed to collaborate with Huawei on standards

The U.S. Department of Commerce announced a new rule that will allow U.S. companies to collaborate in international standards efforts where Huawei is also a participant.

Specifically, under the new Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) rule, technology that would not have required a license to be disclosed to Huawei before the company’s placement on the Entity List can be disclosed for the purpose of standards development in a standards-development body without need for an export license.

The Department of Commerce said its action is meant to ensure Huawei’s placement on the Entity List in May 2019 does not prevent American companies from contributing to important standards-developing activities despite Huawei’s pervasive participation in standards-development organizations.

“The United States will not cede leadership in global innovation. This action recognizes the importance of harnessing American ingenuity to advance and protect our economic and national security,” said U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. “The Department is committed to protecting U.S. national security and foreign policy interests by encouraging U.S. industry to fully engage and advocate for U.S. technologies to become international standards.”

https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2020/06/commerce-clears-way-us-companies-more-fully-engage-tech-standards

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Broadcom joins Nokia's ReefShark silicon program

Nokia and Broadcom are collaborating on the development of advanced semiconductor technologies, including new custom system-on-chip (SoC) processors, which will be integrated into Nokia’s “5G Powered by ReefShark” portfolio. The collaboration further expands the range of Nokia ReefShark chipsets available for 5G solutions and will improve both the system performance and energy footprint of 5G networks. 

The collaboration will leverage Nokia’s wireless technology and Broadcom’s expertise in ASIC technologies.

Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia, said: “This important collaboration highlights our continued commitment to developing our “5G Powered by ReefShark” chipset portfolio and ensures that our 5G solutions deliver a best-in-class performance to our customers. We are delighted to bring Broadcom’s silicon technology leadership and best-in-class ASIC capability to the table, allowing us to deliver a high performance and serve our customers’ needs as the demand for 5G services increases.”

Frank Ostojic, SVP and General Manager of ASIC Products Division at Broadcom, said: “We are excited to partner with Nokia to develop and deploy highly integrated custom silicon solutions for 5G infrastructure. Nokia and Broadcom’s collaboration accelerates silicon innovation and enables operators and end users to realize the unprecedented benefits of 5G.”

https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2020/06/15/nokia-expands-5g-reefshark-chipset-portfolio-with-broadcom-collaboration/

Nokia collaborates with Intel on 5G New Radio and cloud infrastructure

Thursday, March 05, 2020  Nokia  

Nokia announced a collaboration with Intel for its 5G radio portfolio.

Specifically, the companies have worked closely on the new Intel Atom P5900 processor that combines compute, connectivity and acceleration technologies. The jointly developed custom silicon solutions are included in Nokia’s AirScale radio access products being shipped worldwide as part of its 5G “Powered by ReefShark” portfolio.

The partnership also calls for using the latest Intel Xeon processor technology in Nokia’s cloud infrastructure. Nokia’s AirFrame data center solution for edge and core also uses the latest second generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor with built-in AI acceleration. The processor is also included in both Nokia’s AirScale all-in-cloud virtual RAN (vRAN) and 5G core solutions to meet the requirements demanded by 5G technologies. Nokia’s AirScale Cloud RAN virtualizes radio functions to deliver ultra-low latency and high bit rates for demanding services, as well as providing the flexibility to deliver scalability, agility and operational efficiency to meet demand.

Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia, said: “This partnership highlights our continued commitment to ensuring our 5G portfolio is underpinned by best-in-class technology. 5G networks need to support billions of devices and machines, and this massive increase in volume and scale means that existing infrastructure and components must evolve rapidly, adopting technologies and techniques to enable to deploy 5G networks quickly.”

Nokia looks to Marvell for 5G silicon development

Wednesday, March 04, 2020  5G, Marvell, Nokia, Silicon  

Nokia is working with Marvell to develop 5G multi-RAT (Radio Access Technology) silicon, including multiple generations of custom silicon and infrastructure processors.

The new generation of custom system-on-chip (SoC) and infrastructure processors will expand the range of Nokia ReefShark chipsets. Marvell brings its multi-core Arm processor platforms.

Nokia said these new chipsets are designed to be deployed in several building blocks of its AirScale radio access solution.

Matt Murphy, CEO and President of  Marvell: “Marvell is excited and honored to partner with Nokia to enable next-generation solutions for 5G networks. Our platform of semiconductor solutions for data infrastructure in combination with Nokia’s technology and market leadership will enable wireless networks of the future to deliver on the promise of 5G and open a world of new business opportunities.”

Nokia's ReefShark silicon cuts massive MIMO antenna size and power consumption

Monday, January 29, 2018  #5G, Nokia, Silicon  

Nokia unveiled its ReefShark 5G chipsets for radio frequency (RF) units such as the radio used in antennas. The chipsets, which were developed in-house, significantly improve radio performance resulting in halving the size of massive MIMO antennas. Nokia says its ReefShark chipsets also reduce power consumption in baseband units by 64%, compared to current technology.

The ReefShark chipsets comprise:

• ReefShark Digital Front End for LTE and 5G radio systems supporting massive MIMO
• ReefShark RFIC front-end module and transceiver: massive MIMO Adaptive Antenna solution
• ReefShark Baseband Processor: All-in-one compute heavy design, capable of supporting the massive scale requirements of 5G. This is the brain power of baseband processing.

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Intel announces Control-Flow Enforcement Technology

Intel is introducing a new security capability in its silicon microarchitecture to help protect against common malware attack methods that have been a challenge to mitigate with software alone.

Intel's new Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (Intel CET), which will be first available on Intel’s upcoming mobile processor code-named "Tiger Lake," is designed to protect against the misuse of legitimate code through control-flow hijacking attacks – widely used techniques in large classes of malware.

Intel CET offers software developers two key capabilities to help defend against control-flow hijacking malware: indirect branch tracking and shadow stack. Indirect branch tracking delivers indirect branch protection to defend against jump/call-oriented programming (JOP/COP) attack methods. Shadow stack delivers return address protection to help defend against return-oriented programming (ROP) attack methods. These types of attack methods are part of a class of malware referred to as memory safety issues and include tactics such as the corruption of stack buffer overflow and use-after-free.

Microsoft's support Intel CET in Windows 10 is called Hardware-enforced Stack Protection, and a preview of it is available today in Windows 10 Insider Previews. This new Hardware-enforced Stack Protection feature only works on chipsets with Intel CET instructions. It relies on a new CPU architecture that is compliant with Intel CET specifications. For applications running on an OS that supports Intel CET, users can expect detailed guidance from our partners on how applications “opt-in” for protection.

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Evoque Data Center Solutions appoints new CEO

Evoque Data Center Solutions named Andy Stewart as its new Chief Executive Officer, replacing Tim Caulfield, who is stepping down after 18 months.

Stewart previously served as Chief Strategy Officer at TierPoint, where he was responsible for leading product development, technology strategy and mergers and acquisitions. He also has been an Executive Advisor at Thompson Street Capital Partners and a board member at BCM One, a leading managed technology solutions provider.

Evoque is one of the world’s 20 largest global colocation services companies.

“I’m incredibly excited for the opportunity to be joining Evoque as CEO,” said Stewart. “With a foundation of rock-solid data centers, a great set of enterprise clients, and Brookfield’s continued commitment, we will move aggressively to take advantage of the global opportunity for colocation and other IT services.”

“Evoque has evolved over the past 18 months. What once was a business unit within AT&T has now become a stand-alone company operating 31 data centers globally,” said Caulfield. “This is the appropriate time to bring someone in to lead the company through the next stage of development. Andy is joining Evoque to lead the next wave of mission-critical decisions and opportunities facing the company,” he added.

AT&T sells 31 data centers to Brookfield Infrastructure for $1.1 billion

Wednesday, January 02, 2019  AT&T, Data Centers  

AT&T completed the sale of its data center colocation operations and assets to Brookfield Infrastructure and its institutional partners for $1.1 billion. This includes 18 Internet Data Centers (IDC) in the United States and 13 outside the United States. The colocation data center operations serve a diversified customer base of more than 1,000 companies.

Brookfield has established a wholly owned company, Evoque Data Center Solutions ("Evoque"), to own and operate the assets. Customer contracts, employees supporting the colocation operations, fixed assets, leases, and specified owned facilities have been transferred to Brookfield.

Evoque joins AT&T's global colocation ecosystem program where AT&T will offer Evoque's colocation services to business customers. The ecosystem program offers business customers access to 350+ data centers around the world.

AT&T said it will use the $1.1 billion to advance its goal of reducing its net-debt-to-EBITDA-ratio to the 2.5x range by the end of 2019.

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Ericsson debuts RAN Compute baseband

Ericsson released Baseband 6648 offering up to three times greater capacity than existing Ericsson basebands.

Baseband 6648 has been optimized to fit all site types and traffic scenarios, supporting 4G, 5G New Radio and IoT (mixed mode). It has a maximum throughput of 10-15Gbps in downlink and 3Gbps in uplink.

Telstra in Australia and Telia in Sweden are longstanding partners of Ericsson who have successfully deployed the new RAN Compute baseband in their commercial networks.

Channa Seneviratne, Network & Infrastructure Engineering Executive, Telstra, says: “We’re constantly working to utilize the latest RAN technology to improve the customer experience. We value our long-standing relationship with Ericsson and are delighted to have taken part in bringing the latest addition to their RAN Compute family to market.”

Aki Silvennoinen, Director of Converged Access, Network Systems & Delivery, Telia Company, says: “Together with Ericsson we are constantly driving technology innovation in our award-winning radio network. We are therefore thrilled to bring together with Ericsson the latest RAN portfolio to the Swedish market.”

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Nokia wins 10% share of China Unicom’s 5G core

Nokia has been awarded an approximately 10% share of China Unicom’s 5G core network.

The Nokia Cloud core products that China Unicom selected provide Unified Data Management, Session Management and User Plane functions, and are complemented by Data Refinery and NetAct, all deployed on Nokia’s CloudBand.

Unified Data Management, a critical function with the arrival of 5G and the evolution to cloud architecture, manages all subscriber data and services efficiently and cost effectively. The Session Management Function is a fundamental element of the 5G Service Based Architecture, primarily responsible for interacting with the decoupled User Plane Function as well as subscriber session management. The User Plane Function delivers the packet processing foundation for the Service Based Architecture, by allowing packet processing and traffic aggregation to be performed closer to the network edge, thereby increasing bandwidth efficiencies while reducing costs.

The deal also includes products from Nokia’s Cloud Packet Core portfolio, including the Nokia Cloud Mobile Gateway. The product provides the 5G standalone Session Management Function and User Plane Function, in addition to supporting the 4G Serving Gateway and the Packet Data Network Gateway in China Unicom’s network.

“Nokia is very proud to expand our working relationship with China Unicom beyond 4G. We are looking forward to close collaboration with China Unicom on novel business models and 5G service innovation to enable an open 5G ecosystem,” stated Markus Borchert, President of Nokia Greater China.

Nokia noted that it currently has a 17% market share in China Unicom’s rapidly expanding VoLTE network, where it has deployed Nokia’s cloud-based vIMS platform.

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AT&T continues 5G rollout

AT&T continues to expand its 5G network with the activation of service in 137 additional markets across the United States.

The AT&T 5G network now covers more than 160 million people.

“While many of us have been working from home for the past three months, AT&T’s network team continued to build and test our network so that we could emerge from this season with stronger, broader 5G coverage for our customers across the country,” said Chris Sambar, EVP of Technology Operations. “Whether it’s getting you back to work, back to school, or back to play, we’ve got you covered with the fastest1 wireless speeds in the nation.”

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Kioxia introduces SSD with 30.72 TB capacity

Kioxia introduced its 6th generation enterprise SAS SSD family with capacities up to 30.72 TB.

The 24G SAS doubles the data throughput of its predecessor, while implementing new features and enhancements. Featuring Kioxia’s 96-layer BiCS FLASH 3D TLC flash memory, the PM6 series delivers SAS SSD sequential read performance of up to 4,300MB/s (4,101MiB/s), which is more than a 2x improvement over the previous generation.

Key features include:

• Dual-port for high-availability
• Full range of endurance options for a wide variety of workloads: read-intensive (1 DWPD3), mixed-use (3 DWPD) and write-intensive (10 DWPD)
• Multistream write support to reduce write amplification and extend endurance
• Full suite of security options available: sanitize instant erase (SIE), TCG Enterprise self-encrypting drive (SED) and FIPS 140-2 certification.

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GSMA cancels MWC Los Angeles 2020

GSMA officially canceled MWC Los Angeles 2020, which had been scheduled for October 28-30, 2020.

"As a world-class event organiser, we have continued to watch the global trajectory of COVID-19, staying up-to-date with governments and health experts. Last February, in recognition of emerging global circumstances hosting MWC Barcelona, was impossible. Today, in light of current government guidance, continued global concern regarding the spread and containment of COVID-19, travel restrictions and other circumstances, and in consultation with our partner, CTIA, the GSMA announced that continuing with MWC Los Angeles 2020 is likewise, impossible.

While we are disappointed to cancel this event, health and safety remain our top priority, and we will not do anything that could impede or reverse gains made around the world. We are thankful for the medical community, essential workers and those working to eliminate this virus.

We look forward to continuing to engage in North America throughout the year and in the build-up to MWC Los Angeles 2021."

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