The OPPO Research Institute has released its new white paper on Zero-Power Communication. The paper examines the technical positioning of Zero-Power Communication technology in the context of current unmet demand in the IoT space while outlining a future roadmap for the technology to develop in coexistence with other communications systems of the future.

With an aim tomake Zero-Power Communications devices a core part of next-generation communications technologies for greater convenience, inclusivity, and sustainability, OPPO is working with partners across the industry. Such devices can effectively reduce the maintenance costs, waste, and pollution associated with current electronic devices.

Beneficial for commercial applications

Zero-Power Communication technology avoids the need for batteries by harvesting ambient radiofrequency energy in the environment to generate power, resulting in highly compact, efficient, and low-cost devices. Such properties have benefits in commercial applications such as warehousing, logistics, and agriculture and in wearable devices, smart homes, and other cutting-edge consumer applications.

“From the first to the fourth generations of mobile telecommunications technology, the telecommunications industry has gone through four technological leaps — from analog to digital, to data, and finally to broadband. Each of these leaps has been designed to deliver faster data transmission rates; however, over the next decade, looking at 5G technology and even further afield, we no longer believe that data transmission will be as big a driver in telecommunications technology. Instead, we believe that technology should evolve to deliver greater convenience and sustainable value for society as a whole.

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Zero-Power Communications technology offers a means for electronics manufacturers to remove batteries from their products, reducing their costs and environmental impact in the process. As such, Zero-Power Communications is one of our core focus areas as we move into the B5G/6G generation,” said Henry Tang, OPPO’s Chief 5G Scientist.

While passive communication technology already exists today in radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, the current technology suffers from problems such as short communication distances, low efficiency, and small system capacity. This presents significant challenges when applying RFID technology to specific or complex applications such as industrial sensor networks, low-cost and high-capacity logistics and warehousing, low-cost and low-power smart homes, and miniature wearable technology.

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Power sources

Unlike the traditional method, Zero-Power devices can harvest ambient radio signals broadcast from sources such as TV towers, FM radio towers, cellular base stations, and WiFi access points (APs) as their source of power. After harvesting the energy from existing radio waves, the device can modulate ambient radio signals with its own information and transmit these signals outwards in a process known as backscattering communication. When designing Zero-Power Communication networks, it is necessary to consider the coexistence of Zero-Power communication systems and existing 4G/5G systems apart from unlicensed and licensed bands.

Zero-Power Communication systems can be constructed in a framework that uses cellular communications, sidelink communications, or both in hybrid. Cellular based Zero-Power Communications systems are best able to support industrial sensor network applications, for example, applications where the devices may need to be deployed in extreme environments, where the number of devices in a network is large, or where the deployment and maintenance costs of using traditional active devices is high.

The sidelink based approach, on the other hand, is more suited to low-cost, short-range communications, such as wearables or smart home devices, where the devices can also be used to process the data they receive. A hybrid approach using both cellular and sidelink communication methods will further allow developers to unlock more applications using Zero-Power Communications systems.

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Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, has recently introduced its new premium mobile processor, the Exynos 2200. The Exynos 2200 is a freshly designed mobile processor with a powerful AMD RDNA 2 architecture-based Samsung Xclipse graphics processing unit (GPU). With the most cutting-edge Arm®-based CPU cores available in the market and an upgraded neural processing unit (NPU), the Exynos 2200 will enable the ultimate mobile phone gaming experience, as well as enhance the overall experience in social media apps and photography.

“Built on the most advanced 4-nanometer (nm) EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) process, and combined with cutting-edge mobile, GPU and NPU technology, Samsung has crafted the Exynos 2200 to provide the finest experience for smartphone users. With the Xclipse, our new mobile GPU built with RDNA 2 graphics technology from the industry leader AMD, the Exynos 2200 will redefine mobile gaming experience, aided by enhanced graphics and AI performance,” said Yongin Park, President of System LSI Business at Samsung Electronics.

What is Xclipse?

The Xclipse GPU is a one-of-a-kind hybrid graphic processor that is positioned between the console and the mobile graphic processor. Xclipse is the combination of ‘X’ that represents Exynos, and the word ‘eclipse’. Like an eclipse, the Xclipse GPU will bring an end to the old era of mobile gaming and mark the start of an exciting new chapter.

With the high-performance AMD RDNA 2 architecture as its backbone, the Xclipse inherits advanced graphic features such as hardware accelerated ray tracing (RT) and variable rate shading (VRS) that were previously only available on PCs, laptops and consoles.

Ray tracing is a revolutionary technology that closely simulates how light physically behaves in the real world. By calculating the movement and the color characteristic of light rays as they bounce off the surface, ray tracing produces realistic lighting effects for graphically rendered scenes. To offer the most immersive graphics and user experiences even on mobile, Samsung has collaborated with AMD to realize the industry’s first ever hardware-accelerated ray tracing on mobile GPU.

Variable Rate Shading

It is a technique that optimizes GPU workload by allowing developers to apply lower shading rate in areas where overall quality will not be affected. This gives GPU more room to work on areas that matter most to the gamers and improve frame-rate for smoother gameplay.

In addition, the Xclipse GPU comes with various technologies such as advanced multi-IP governor (AMIGO) that enhance overall performance and efficiency.

“AMD RDNA 2 graphics architecture extends power-efficient, advanced graphics solutions to PCs, laptops, consoles, automobiles and now to mobile phones. Samsung’s Xclipse GPU is the first result of multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exynos SoCs,” said David Wang, Senior Vice President of Radeon Technologies Group at AMD.

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 Enhanced 5G connectivity and ironclad security features

The Exynos 2200 is one of the first in the market to integrate Arm’s latest Armv9 CPU cores which offer a substantial improvement over Armv8 in terms of security and performance, the two areas that are becoming critically important in today’s mobile communications devices.

The octa-core CPU of Exynos 2200 is designed in a tri-cluster structure made up of a single powerful Arm Cortex®-X2 flagship-core, three performance and efficiency balanced Cortex-A710 big-cores and four power-efficient Cortex-A510 little-cores.

“The digital experiences of tomorrow require new levels of performance, security and efficiency,” said Rene Haas, President of IP Products Group (IPG) at Arm. “As one of the first processors to incorporate the new Armv9 CPU cores, Samsung’s Exynos 2200 takes advantage of Arm’s Total Compute strategy and key security features, like Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), to deliver the purpose-built compute and specialized processing needed to power future mobile experiences.”

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The Exynos 2200 offers more powerful on-device artificial intelligence (AI) with an upgraded NPU. The NPU’s performance has doubled compared to its predecessor, allowing more calculations in parallel and enhancing the AI performance. The NPU now offers much higher precision with FP16 (16bit floating point) support in addition to power efficient INT8 (8bit integer) and INT16.

Also, the Exynos 2200 integrates a fast 3GPP Release 16 5G modem supporting both sub-6GHz and mmWave (millimeter Wave) spectrum bands. With E-UTRAN New Radio – Dual Connectivity (EN-DC), which utilizes both 4G LTE and 5G NR signals, the modem can boost the speed up to 10Gbps.

For safekeeping, the Exynos 2200 comes with Integrated Secure Element (iSE) to store private cryptographic keys as well as to play a role as RoT (Root of Trust). Also, an inline encryption HW for UFS and DRAM has been reinforced to have user data encryption safely shared only within the secure domain.

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Enhanced visual experience and quality images

The Exynos 2200’s image signal processor (ISP) architecture has been redesigned to support the latest image sensors for ultra-high resolution of up to 200 megapixel (MP). At 30 frames-per-second (fps), the ISP supports up to 108 MP in single camera mode, and 64+36 MP in dual camera mode. It can also connect up to seven individual image sensors and drive four concurrently for advanced multi-camera setups. For video recording, the ISP supports up to 4K HDR (or 8K) resolution.

Together with the NPU, the ISP utilizes an advanced content-aware AI camera for more refined and realistic results. When taking a photograph, the machine learning based AI camera recognizes multiple objects, the environment and faces within the scene. It then applies optimal settings for color, white balance, exposure, dynamic range and more to produce professional-level quality images.

With 8K resolution support, the Exynos 2200’s advanced multi-format codec (MFC) makes videos truly come to life. It decodes videos up to 4K at 240fps or 8K at 60fps and encodes up to 4K at 120fps or 8K at 30fps. In addition, the MFC integrates power efficient AV1 decoder enabling longer playback time. The advanced display solution features HDR10+ adding more dynamic range and depth to the picture and offers refresh rates of up to 144Hz for a more responsive and smoother transitioning experience when scrolling or playing games.

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