NSF launches Resilient and Intelligent Next-Generation Systems program

The U.S. National Science Foundation unveiled a new Resilient and Intelligent Next-Generation Systems (RINGS) program to accelerate research in areas that will potentially have significant impact on emerging Next Generation (NextG) wireless and mobile communication, networking, sensing, and computing systems, along with global-scale services. The focus is on greatly improving the resiliency of such networked systems among other performance metrics

Central to NextG systems is resiliency to survive, gracefully adapt to, and rapidly recover from malicious attacks, component failures, and natural and human-induced disruptions. Therefore, the RINGS program will seek to advance the underlying technologies to guarantee worldwide availability, security and reliability of NextG systems.

The RINGS program will be a collaboration between the federal government and private industry, including:

Department of Defense Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering

National Institute of Standards and Technology

• Apple
• Ericsson
• Google
• IBM
• Intel
• Microsoft
• Nokia
• Qualcomm Technologies
• VMware.

https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/announcements/042721.jsp

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5G for 12GHz Coalition lobbies the FCC

A new "5G for 12GHz Coalition" has been established to promote the 500 MHz of available capacity in the12 GHz bandfor 5G.

The group, which is backed by more than 20 prominent public interest groups, trade associations and companies, is urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to act swiftly and modernize decades-old rules to allow the critical capacity in the12 GHz spectrum band to be utilized for 5G. 

“America has a historic opportunity to immediately unleash the power of the 12 GHz band for 5G, and the members of this Coalition are linking arms to call for much-needed, swift action. This will ensure our nation’s position as a global leader, enhance broadband infrastructure and availability, expand consumer choice, and drive innovation,” said Chip Pickering, CEO of INCOMPAS, one of the Coalition’s founding members, and Co-Chair of the Coalition.

5G for 12 GHz includes the following group of diverse founding members:  INCOMPAS, Public Knowledge, DISH, Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), RS Access, Open Technology Institute at New America (OTI), Federated Wireless, AtLink, Cambridge Broadband Network Groups (CBNG), Center for Educational Innovations, Center for Rural Strategies, Etheric Networks, GeoLinks, GoLong Wireless, Granite Telecommunications, mmWave Tech, Resound Networks, Rural Wireless Association (RWA), Telnet Worldwide, Tilson, White Cloud, Xiber and X-Lab.

https://5gfor12ghz.com/x

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Huawei's Q1 revenue drops 16.5% year-on-year

Huawei reported Q1 2021 revenue of CNY152.2 billion (US$23.17 billio) in revenue, a 16.5% decrease year-on-year. 

The company said its network business maintained steady growth, while its consumer business revenue declined, in part as a result of selling the Honor smart device brand in November 2020. Huawei's net profit margin was up 3.8 percentage points year-on-year at 11.1% – the result of the company's ongoing efforts to improve quality of operations and management efficiency, as well as a patent royalty income of US$600 million.

"2021 will be another challenging year for us, but it's also the year that our future development strategy will begin to take shape," said Eric Xu, Huawei's Rotating Chairman. "We thank our customers and partners for their ongoing trust. No matter what challenges come our way, we will continue to maintain our business resilience. Not just to survive, but do so sustainably. As always, we will remain focused on the needs of our customers and keep delivering practical business value."

"As always, we remain committed to technological innovation and investing heavily in R&D as we work to address supply continuity challenges caused by restrictions in the market", stressed Xu. "We will continue making breakthroughs in basic science and pushing the frontiers of technology."

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Equinix: 2021 to be most active build year so far

Equinix reported quarterly revenue of $1.596 billion, up 10% compared to the same quarter last year, or 7% on a normalized and constant currency basis, representing the company's 73rd consecutive quarter of revenue growth. Net income was $156 million, a 207% increase over the previous quarter, primarily due to strong operating performance and lower acquisition and debt redemption costs, or $1.74 per share, a 205% increase over the previous quarter.

Equinix said 2021 is set to be one of the most active build years ever, with 36 major projects underway across 28 markets and 19 countries.

Charles Meyers, President and CEO, Equinix: "We had a great start to the year, and as businesses continue to navigate towards a post-pandemic world, Equinix is uniquely well-positioned. Digital transformation continues to accelerate, and businesses across a broad range of verticals are recognizing that their infrastructure can be a key source of competitive advantage in an increasingly digital world. Q1 also marked a milestone for Equinix as we are now the market leader in retail colocation in all three regions of the world, taking the number-one spot in Asia-Pacific for the first time. Demand is strong with global IT spend expected to rebound above pre-pandemic levels as enterprises increase hybrid cloud spending, and service providers build out their delivery platforms to tap into this demand." 

Some highlights:

• In Q1, Equinix delivered one of the strongest net bookings quarters in the company's history, with more than 4,300 deals across more than 3,200 customers, and the lowest churn in many years.
• The $3 billion xScale program is expected to develop over 290 megawatts of power capacity for hyperscale customers across its first two off-balance sheet joint ventures. 
• In Q1, Equinix announced the construction of the first building of its DB5x campus in Dublin, Ireland, which is 100% pre-leased to a major hyperscaler and is expected to be added to a current or future joint venture.
• Interconnection revenues grew in Q1 16% year-over-year, or 13% on a normalized and constant currency basis, and Equinix added more than 6,700 net interconnections – more than its next 10 competitors combined – bringing the company's total interconnections to over 398,000.

https://investor.equinix.com/

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UK completes spectrum auction for 700 MHz and 3.6-3.8 GHz

Ofcom completed the assignment stage for its recent auction of 700 MHz and 3.6-3.8 GHz bands in the UK.  Here are the results:

• EE Limited – 723-733 MHz and 778-788 MHz;738-758 MHz; and 3680-3720 MHz.
• Hutchison 3G UK Limited – 713-723 MHz and 768-778 MHz.
• Telefónica UK Limited – 703-713 MHz and 758-768 MHz; and 3760-3800 MHz.
• Vodafone Limited – 3720-3760 MHz.

Winners of spectrum in the 3.6-3.8 GHz band also had the opportunity to negotiate their spectrum positions among themselves. This stage was an important step towards helping companies bring their spectrum holdings in the wider 3.4-3.8 GHz band closer together by giving them the opportunity to discuss post-auction trades to consolidate spectrum won in the 3.6-3.8 GHz band and airwaves they already held in the 3.4-3.6 GHz band. Telefónica UK Limited and Vodafone Limited entered into an agreement during the negotiation period.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/features-and-news/final-spectrum-auction-results

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Global Unichip simulates complex switch with hundreds of 112G PAM4 lanes

Global Unichip Corporation (GUC) is using the Cadence Clarit 3D Solver in its simulation workflow to design a complex network switch with hundreds of 112G PAM4 long-reach (LR) lanes. 

Cadence said the efficiency of the Clarity 3D Solver required no partitioning of the design, thereby eliminating any concern of inaccurate results attributed to a fractured approach. On top of the “no partitioning needed” benefit, the GUC engineers achieved a five-fold speedup compared to legacy tools that relied upon partitioning. The Clarity 3D Solver’s combination of exceptional accuracy, speed and capacity enabled GUC to perform tradeoffs and what-if analysis before tapeout and to optimize the detailed ultra-scale, high-performance flip-chip BGA (HFCBGA) package design for peak performance at the lowest cost.

“Exciting new technology such as Clarity 3D Solver, Celsius Thermal Solver, and Sigrity X are foundational to Cadence cross-domain, multiphysics solutions addressing EM, thermal and SI/PI for today’s electronic systems. Customer response has been tremendous to the unprecedented performance, capacity, scalability and accuracy of the Clarity 3D Solver performing true 3D simulations of complete systems including interposer, package, and PCB,” said Ben Gu, vice president of multiphysics system analysis in the Custom IC & PCB Group at Cadence. “GUC is continuing its design engineering excellence through design of this next-generation data center switch, for which Cadence Allegro, Clarity and Sigrity technologies played a significant role in the design, analysis and signoff of hundreds of 112G LR lanes.”

http://www.cadence.com/go/clarityhyperscale

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MaxLinear posts record sales of $209 million

 MaxLinear reported quarterly net revenue of $209.4 million, up 8% sequentially, and up 238% year-on-year. GAAP gross margin was 53.4%, compared to 42.7% in the prior quarter, and 49.6% in the year-ago quarter. Non-GAAP income from operations was 24% of revenue, compared to 19% in the prior quarter, and 13% in the year-ago quarter. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.55, compared to diluted earnings per share of $0.39 in the prior quarter, and diluted earnings per share of $0.07 in the year-ago quarter.

 

“In the first quarter, we posted record revenue, up 8% sequentially, due to strong demand for infrastructure and broadband access products. Solid demand for our broadband access and connectivity products is being driven by a combination of end-market strength and company-specific drivers including silicon content increases and share gains. Our cash flow from operations was approximately $40.3 million with non-GAAP gross margin of 58.6% in the quarter. In Q1, we also started mass production shipments of our 5G 4x4 radio transceiver SoCs. Despite the anticipated challenging manufacturing supply-chain dynamics throughout the rest of the year, owing to the strong demand backdrop for our connectivity and broadband access business, combined with the expected revenue contributions from the continued ramp of our infrastructure products in the latter half of 2021, we feel increasingly confident in the Company’s outlook for the remainder of this year and heading into 2022,” commented Kishore Seendripu, Ph.D., Chairman and CEO.

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EdgeConneX scales out footprint in 6 cities

EdgeConneX announced the expansion of its edge data center platform in several key North American markets. Initially, EdgeConneX will add nearly 20MWs of new capacity across its existing footprint in the Seattle, Portland, Phoenix, Miami, Detroit, and Chicago markets. The expansions will allow major service providers around the world to scale their local cloud, content, network, and other offerings in these markets, empowering them to meet the growing need for distributed data center capacity that is highly proximate to their end users.

“We have always focused on building data centers where, when and how our customers want capacity to support their business,” comments Phillip Marangella, Chief Marketing Officer at EdgeConneX. “Our strategy of listening to our customers to provide tailored solutions for them that span hyperlocal to hyperscale data centers is what makes us unique. These planned expansions, necessitated by the growing volume, variety and velocity of data our customers are driving, highlight the accelerating need for digital infrastructure and capacity to best support their customers.”

https://www.edgeconnex.com/

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Disney+ streaming powered by AWS

The Walt Disney Company is leveraging AWS for the global rollout of Disney+, one of the largest online streaming video services in the world having surpassed 100 million subscribers only 16 months after launch in November 2019. AWS is the preferred cloud provider.

Disney+ is expanding its use of AWS’s services to include more than 50 technologies, such as machine learning, database, storage, content delivery, serverless, and analytics. For example, Disney+ uses Amazon Kinesis (a service that makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data) and Amazon DynamoDB (AWS’s key-value database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale with built-in encryption and data recovery) to ingest content, metadata, and billions of customer actions each day, which enables viewers to add content to their Watch Lists, and start watching a video and pick it up on a different device, or make recommendations for what to watch next. Disney+ also uses Amazon Timestream (AWS’s serverless, time-series database built for large scale ingestion, storage, and real-time querying of times-series data) to monitor the efficacy of their streaming platform to ensure that users continue to have access to the highest quality video content.

“Disney+ has completely reinvented what’s possible in content delivery by challenging convention and using cloud technology to build a streaming product from scratch that had never been launched and marketed before on such a global scale,” said Joe Inzerillo, executive vice president & CTO, direct-to-consumer, The Walt Disney Company. “AWS has been our preferred cloud provider for years, and its proven global infrastructure and expansive suite of services has contributed meaningfully to the incredible success of Disney+.”

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Equinix expands on ramps to Microsoft Azure

Equinix is expanding private network access to Microsoft Azure in six new global markets, including Berlin, Bogotá, Canberra, Dubai, Rio de Janeiro and Seoul. 

The expanded Azure ExpressRoute service provides enterprises with direct, on-demand network access to a variety of Azure services, including Azure VMware Solution.

With this expansion, private cloud on-ramps to Azure ExpressRoute are now available in 32 Equinix metros.

Azure VMware Solution is available via Platform Equinix in 10 global Azure regions . The hybrid cloud solution can be accessed directly in Equinix IBX data centers located in Amsterdam, Chicago, Dublin, London, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto and Washington, D.C. via Equinix Fabric. 

Equinix Fabric is a software-defined interconnection service that allows any business to connect between its own distributed infrastructure and to any other company's infrastructure on Platform Equinix. When combined with Azure ExpressRoute, Equinix Fabric enables seamless, on-demand, direct access to cloud services such as Azure.

Maura Hameroff, Director of Product Marketing for Azure, Microsoft, states: "By providing ExpressRoute connectivity to Microsoft Azure in more than 30 markets around the world, Equinix enables customers to adopt Azure VMWare Solution for migration, disaster recovery and hybrid scenarios. As Microsoft continues to deploy Azure VMware Solution globally, we are pleased to have Equinix as one of our partners that can provide dedicated access to these services through their network of data centers and global interconnection platform."

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SpaceX completes 25th Starlink launch

SpaceX successfully launched its next batch of 60 Starlink satellites aboard a Falcon 9 booster from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The booster successfully landed on the drone ship in the Atlantic.

It was the 25th Starlink launch mission and the 11th mission of 2021 all of which used reflown boosters. 

The Falcon 9 first stage rocket booster used for this launch previously supported launch of GPS III Space Vehicle 03, Turksat 5A, and four Starlink missions.

https://www.spacex.com/launches/

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Factorial Energy emerges from stealth with solid-state battery for EVs

Factorial Energy, a start-up based in Woburn, Massachusetts, emerged from stealth to announce its plans for a 40 Amp-hour solid-state battery cell for electric vehicles (EVs) and other applications. 

The Factorial Electrolyte System Technology (FEST™) is a proprietary solid electrolyte material said to be safer than conventional lithium-ion technology, replacing the combustible liquid electrolyte with a safer, more stable solid-state electrolyte that suppresses lithium dendrite formation on lithium-metal anodes. Product specifics and timelines were not disclosed.

Factorial Energy is naming Joe Taylor as Executive Chairman. Taylor, the former Chairman and CEO of Panasonic Corporation of North America, played a key role in the development of the Tesla-Panasonic relationship, which resulted in Panasonic investing in the Tesla Gigafactory in Reno, Nevada. In addition, the former Chairman of the Board of Management of Daimler AG and Head of Mercedes-Benz, Dieter Zetsche, is also joining the company's advisory board.

https://factorialenergy.com/

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Opsera raises $15 million for its DevOps orchestration

Opsera, a start-up based in San Francisco, announced $15 million in Series A funding for its orchestration platform for DevOps. 

Opsera said its self-service, no-code DevOps orchestration platform helps engineers to provision or integrate their CI/CD tools of choice from a common architectural framework. This enables them tobuild declarative pipelines for a variety of use cases including SDLC (software delivery lifecycle), IaC (infrastructure as code) and SaaS application releases e.g. Salesforce, Workday, etc. Opsera simplifies the set-up, use, and management of commercial and open-source tools across the DevOps ecosystem, and correlates and unifies data to provide contextualized diagnostics, metrics and actionable insights. 

The funding round was led by Felicis Ventures. Existing investors Clear Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Firebolt Ventures, and new investor HMG Ventures, also participated. The company has raised $19.3 million since it was founded in 2020. 

http://opsera.io

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