It was good to be back at Mobile World Congress, to feel again the energy of face-to-face meetings at the premier gathering place of the mobile industry and test the waters for POLYN’s NASP (Neuromorphic Analog Signal Processor) concept. 

The trade show halls were dominated by the monstrous stands of big companies such as Samsung, ZTE, Huawei, and OPPO. AR/VR headsets were presented by almost all major telecom providers, and IBM showed a robodog, Spot, running around the halls accompanied by two operators. Quite impressive. 6G, Metaverse, 5G Advanced, and even O-RAN were not as prominent at the show as we initially expected them to be.

The major chipset suppliers Qualcomm and MediaTek were both fully present at MWC, showcasing their latest products that underpin the changes set to shape the future of the whole industry. Qualcomm is pushing hard to make 5G mmWave a commercial reality and implement its 5G AI suite to improve throughput and provide mmWave range extension.

For many major device manufacturers we visited, there was  a significant shift toward launching connected products other than smartphones: smartwatches, tablets, notebooks, and mobile hotspot routers.

We heard a lot of talk about edge computing, 5G, wireless communications, and heavy use of AI at all levels:  on-device, at the edge, in a cloud. Despite a large number of exhibitors showcasing AI, neuromorphic computing was still quite an exotic topic. Disruptive technologies always are at first. 

We saw companies that developed sophisticated neural networks but have no solution to take them off the cloud and put into, say, wearables.

We met new people who expressed excitement about the NASP concept. As one Israeli exhibitor put it, “Wow, it’s like adding a brain to my sensor. Let’s talk after the show!”

To sum up, from POLYN’s perspective, MWC was about connectivity  fostering the digital transformation into Industry 4.0. However, the industry still lacks smarter usage of sensor data, and here POLYN sees a huge market for the NASP solution.