"The essence of the patent system is to encourage innovation, promote technology disclosure and be used fairly and widely by the industry, thereby promoting industrial prosperity and social progress." This is Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei's incisive exposition on patent rights.
In fact, in the past ten years, China has continuously made major breakthroughs in original innovation and key core technology research, and has formed a large number of high-quality independent intellectual property rights centered on patents.
Relevant data show that China's total social R&D investment has increased from 1.03 trillion yuan in 2012 to 2.79 trillion yuan in 2021, ranking second in the world.
At Huawei's "Exploring Innovation Horizons: 2022 Innovation and Intellectual Property Forum" held recently in Shenzhen, Liu Hua, Director of the China Office of the World Intellectual Property Organization, pointed out that at present, the global innovation center is moving eastward to Asia, and China has established a global innovation leader's position.
According to Liu Hua, according to the "Global Innovation Index" report released by the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2021, China ranks 12th overall.
China has 19 of the world's top technology clusters, with Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou and Beijing ranking second and third respectively.
Fan Zhiyong, head of Huawei's Intellectual Property Department, said that Huawei's Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications have ranked first in the world for five consecutive years.
In the past five years, more than 2 billion smartphones have been licensed by Huawei's 4G/5G patents; currently, there are about 8 million connected vehicles licensed by Huawei's 4G/5G patents every year.
Fan Zhiyong, Director of Huawei's Intellectual Property Department
The forum also released Huawei's biennial "Ten Inventions" achievements, including a new additive neural network, multi-objective game algorithm, optical iris, full-precision floating-point computing, head-up display system, deterministic IP, 5G Single Air, active-active network attached storage, etc.
These inventions have achieved enormous economic and social benefits.
Communication network simulation reality: reduce manual labor and improve network performance
Huawei is the world's leading provider of information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart terminals, and has absolute technological advantages in related fields.
SRCON technology, the full name is Simulated Reality of Communication Networks, that is, the simulated reality of communication networks.
According to reports, this is a method to accurately simulate a mobile communication network, which can effectively evaluate potential adjustments before the network is deployed.
Based on massive data collected from real-world networks, SRCON technology leverages artificial intelligence, mathematics, and communication technologies to build mathematical models of complex communication networks to predict network behavior.
Through SRCON, simulation can be performed to understand the experience of each user in the network, and algorithms can be used to quickly solve the optimal structure of large-scale networks, and make corresponding adjustments to provide users with the best network experience while minimizing energy consumption. .
At present, SRCON has been applied to four countries, helping five operators to optimize their networks serving 3 million users, involving a total of 12,000 base stations.
SRCON can further improve network performance by 5.36% while reducing manual labor.
Multi-objective game algorithm: Solve the difficult cases of taking over 70% of the interactive scenarios
In the field of autonomous driving, Huawei also has a deep technical reserve.
The multi-objective game algorithm realizes lightweight positioning, multi-task perception and multi-objective interactive game decision-making, which significantly improves the autonomous driving ability in a complex environment such as mixed traffic between people and vehicles.
In this patent package, using vector positioning, only a few very clear key features such as light poles and traffic signs are defined, and the relative positions and joint errors of elements are used to avoid invalid matching.
Compared with traditional solutions, this method can reduce CPU consumption by 85% and storage overhead by 200 times.
For the perception function, the patent package builds a large network with multi-tasking and high-performance, which improves the network performance by 8 times, and realizes the pluggability and expansion of new tasks at the same time.
With positioning and perception comes decision making.
The main content of this patent package is the multi-objective game decision-making algorithm framework, and the most important problem to solve is automatic driving in a particularly complex environment.
For example, the intersection during the rush hour, and the narrow area where the takeaway brother shuttles back and forth.
In such a mixed environment of people and vehicles, simultaneous interaction with multiple obstacles must be considered.
From this perspective, the patent package puts all objects related to autonomous vehicles into a unified framework to model and solve.
In this unified framework, this technology will fully consider the mutual influence of game objects, realize game decision-making of multi-objective interaction in complex environments, and make autonomous vehicles neither "timid" to stop, nor rampage. , which can solve more than 70% of the difficult cases of interactive scene takeover.
Huawei: Establish scientific and reasonable intellectual property values
The "Top Ten Inventions" is a microcosm of Huawei's investment in innovation, which allows the public to more intuitively feel part of the results of Huawei's research investment.
According to Fan Zhiyong, Huawei's patent applications in China continue to rise, exceeding 10,000 in 2020 and nearly 12,000 in 2021.
Over the past three years, facing numerous challenges, Huawei has insisted on investing at least US$3 billion in basic research every year.
Up to now, Huawei is the company with the most patents granted in China.
Huawei's annual patent applications in the United States are close to 4,000, and the annual number of new authorizations is about 3,000.
In 2021, Huawei will rank fifth in the number of newly granted patents in the United States, with a total of 20,000 patents in the United States.
According to data released by the European Patent Office, in 2019 and 2021, Huawei is the applicant with the most patent applications in Europe.
"In 2021, Huawei's R&D investment will reach 142.7 billion yuan, accounting for 22.4% of the annual revenue, and the R&D expenditure and expense ratio will be at the highest level in the past ten years. At present, Huawei's R&D investment ranks second among global enterprises. In recent years, the annual investment in basic research has exceeded 20 billion yuan." Song Liuping, Huawei's chief legal officer, gave such a set of data.
Song Liuping, Chief Legal Officer of Huawei
While continuing to innovate, Huawei has always attached great importance to the protection and open sharing of innovative achievements.
Huawei discloses a large number of innovative achievements to the industry through patents, and is willing to provide patents and technology licenses around the world, share the achievements of scientific and technological innovation with the world, and jointly develop innovative vision and ideas, thereby promoting industrial development and technological progress. .
At present, Huawei's patent value has been widely recognized, especially in mainstream standards such as cellular technology, Wi-Fi, and audio and video codecs.
Huawei has signed patent licensing agreements with manufacturers in the fields of smartphones, connected cars, networking technology, IoT and smart homes.
As Ren Zhengfei said, Huawei must establish scientific and reasonable intellectual property values, continue to protect research and innovation results, actively build high-value patent packages on a global scale, continue to play the role of patents in protecting the company's global business security, and lay a solid foundation for Huawei's innovation through reasonable fees. image of the person.
Liu Hua also recognized Huawei's continuous investment in innovation, and said that WIPO expects Huawei to continue to participate in high-level global competition with innovation as the core.