Huawei and Qualcomm leads Wi-Fi 6 innovation

A Chinese information and communication technology academy released a report on Global Wi-Fi 6 technology innovation and standard 2022 and Huawei is revealed to be a leader in this Wi-Fi version along with Qualcomm.

Patent data and analysis are based on the data compiled throughout the year including legal status, layout region, patentee, and technology to demonstrate global Wi-Fi 6 innovation activities and development trends.

The researcher pointed out that the evaluation results show that among the 2,115 Wi-Fi 6-related patent families retrieved and evaluated (published before July 2021), 606 were evaluated as Wi-Fi 6 standard-essential patent families.

Among them, companies with the largest holdings include Qualcomm, Huawei, Intel, LG, Marvell/NXP, MediaTek, Broadcom, and ZTE. The total number of Wi-Fi 6 standard-essential patent families of the above-mentioned eight companies exceeds 90% of the number of Wi-Fi 6 standard-essential patent families assessed this time.

From these Wi-Fi 6 leaders, Qualcomm ranked first, accounting for 20.46%, and Huawei ranked second, accounting for 20.30%. From a technical point of view, frame structure design, preamble design, and OFDMA are the most deployed technical directions.

Judging from the time distribution of 606 family patents, before the IEEE started the standardization work of 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) in 2013, enterprises had already started the pre-research work of the Wi-Fi 6 standard and laid out a small number of Wi-Fi 6 standard requirements. patent.

After 2013, while enterprises actively participated in standard formulation, they also concentrated on the deployment of Wi-Fi 6 standard essential patents, and the number of applications reached a peak in 2015, and then began to decrease year by year.

Among the 3,564 Wi-Fi 6 valid patents/patent applications in the 606 families, the number of applications in the United States ranked first, accounting for 31.9%; the number of applications in China ranked second, accounting for 14.9%.

Japan’s patent applications accounted for 13.7%, 8.7%, and 8.2% respectively. Another 22.6% of patents are distributed in 33 other countries or regions around the world, among which Brazil, Canada, and Australia are the most distributed countries.