Rights Issues

Funding British universities to develop technology has led to the creation of Intellectual Property that is critcal to doing business internationally.

oil that greases the wheels of the mobile industry, but is contentious and highly political. As Robert Pocknell, a Director at N&M Consultancy and chairman at the Fair Standards Alliance explained in Issue 6 of this magazine, the behaviour of the market leaders has long been an issue for rivals – but now it’s causing concern at the highest levels of government, too.

This is because mobile network intellectual property is dominated by Nokia, Ericsson and Qualcomm, and the dominance of the two Nordics in particular over the standards process is a lucrative business. In 5G Huawei dominates. According to research from Iplytics, Huawei held the largest share of 5G patents worldwide as of February 2021, with 15.39 percent of all 5G patent families.

In fairness, the companies invest heavily in R&D, which creates a huge amount of mobile telecommunications intellectual property: Strategy Analytics has estimated that 5G would generate close to $20 billion in royalties a year from handsets alone, with around 35 per cent of that flowing to Nokia and Ericsson.

But having so many seats on the standards bodies means they are also able to steer more of their own intellectual property into a process which ensures everyone must pay the piper to hear their tune.

This is called SEP licensing, it’s a process by which every equipment maker must pay a licensing fee back to the intellectual property holder, if they wish to sell equipment compatible with the standard, such as 4G or 5G. These are patents deemed to be “SEP”, or standards-essential patents. It obliges a reciprocal duty on patent holders to license on reasonable terms (FRAND: fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) – they can’t withhold it, erecting a crude barrier to competition. But the obligatory SEP fees add up to an indirect disincentive to potential equipment makers. With hopes that Open RAN leads to a more heterogenous and diverse market, intellectual property has become a hot issue.

The Government’s 5G Diversification Strategy Report last December observed that the “Concentration of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) and Intellectual Property portfolios amongst market leading suppliers for receiving and transmitting signals, and the difference in signal strength between these is huge.

Bristol Brilliance

All mobile phones are simultaneously receivers and transmitters – an advance on the early walkie talkie days of radio, – when it was your turn to speak, you pressed a button. So mobile phones use different frequencies

A phone needs to “hear” a signal from the mobile phone base station which is as quiet as a whisper, while transmitting a signal which is relatively as loud as a jet engine. It’s important that the loud signal doesn’t swamp the quiet one. So all phones contain filters, and these are an important part of radio design.

Thirty years ago, mobile phones only used a few frequencies, each with pairs for receiving and transmitting signals. Today, there are dozens. Both 4G and 5G phones use a technique called Carrier Aggregation which sees them join multiple frequency bands together. This was made possible by Software Defined Radio, with the software doing more work, rather than dedicated components for each frequency.

But the same is not true of filters. So a handset designer still needs to choose which subset of frequencies to support. This often means having different versions of the that limit new market entrants from accessing licenses that are crucial to the development of telecoms equipment and push up R&D costs and requirements”. It becomes not just an issue for companies but for nations as the need to licence technology and the patents associated with them may mean trading with some less than friendly nations. Having patents of your own is a crucial weapon in this.

SEPs are also the subject of much llitigation between large companies. In same handset for different parts of the world.

A phone bought in the US will be different to one bought in Europe, and while there will be common frequencies and you will be able to travel from place to place when you are abroad your phone won’t make the best use of the available networks. It would be better for everyone if there was a way for all phones to support all frequencies.

The technology produced by British semiconductor company, Forefront RF, is designed to have a big impact here, allowing the receiver to “hear” the weakest signals while transmitting at full power. The circuits operate over a wide frequency range removing the need for a bank of dedicated switched crystal filters, allowing the circuitry needed for a phone, a watch or an IoT device to shrink.

Intellectual Property is a critical part of Forefront RF’s business, and the company is building a strong portfolio to protect its innovations. But, since it supplies an implementation specific component (and not a whole modem) it does not

January, Apple lodged a formal complaint with the International Trade Commission claiming that three 5G patents belonging to Ericsson were not essential at all, but were being used to “coerce” Apple into paying a fee. Ericsson had sued Apple for infringement, and sued them again following the complaint. Where does this leave the UK? The argument is that if more IP can be generated and owned by smaller UK entities, then equipment makers will find it easier to create new telecoms need to license standards essential patents. equipment. This should lower the cost of building 5G networks, and strengthen the industrial sector to boot. shows how a tiny change in a small component can make a difference.

Leo Laughlin, CTO, explains: “Our work culminated in a demonstration of a circuit and associated signal processing algorithms that for the first time could meet the relevant 3GPP specifications without using duplex filters. What we discovered was a new class of Adaptive Passive Cancellation circuits that combine tunable filtering with cancellation to give the selectivity needed”.

Forefront RF was founded in 2020 and has attracted £1.5m in venture capital.

Which is where Britain’s world-leading universities enter the picture.

Here we look at two which could play a pivotal role. Both are commercial spin-outs. Work at the Electrical Engineering department at Bristol university has been commercialised by Forefront RF, while Southampton begat AccelerComm.

Smart Southampton

Filters are also the key to a breakthrough from AccelerComm, a spin-out from Southampton university. The algorithms and technology the company has developed here

AccelerComm’s filter design makes a mobile base station more power efficient. That means each base stations consumes less electricity, and the savings from backhaul, land, and maintenance are also very significant. How you choose to use the efficiency is up to the network and the base station designer, but the end result is akin to something for nothing. The intellectual property the company has developed is important for the part of a base station where the hardware meets the software, at what is called the Physical Layer.

Improving the efficiency of this has knock-on effects for the whole of the radio network.

Open RAN operators face significant impacts in the performance of their network as a result. AccelerComm’s improvement is to make the technology 5G specific, optimising it for mobile base stations.

Prof Rob Maunder, Chief Technical Officer and company founder explains “Our complete Open RAN 5G channel coder/decoder design can bring dramatic benefits. The AccelerComm IP packages can be quickly integrated and flexibly delivered for use in custom silicon (ASIC), programmable hardware (FPGA), or as software solutions.”

One of the first applications of this will be in the DCMS funded FRANC projects, where AccelerComm is part of both the Best of British and the DU-Volution consortia.