How 6G will revolutionize communication and innovation with Qualcomm's John Smee
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Welcome to today's episode of Lexicon. I'm Christopher McFadden, Contributing Writer for Interesting Engineering. Today we sit down with John Smee, Qualcomm's Vice President of Engineering and Global Head of Wireless Research, to talk about the transformative potential of 6G and its role in shaping the future of global communication.

From advancing AI integration to improving energy efficiency and rural connectivity, discover how Qualcomm drives innovation to redefine industries, empower content creators, revolutionize how we work, learn, and interact in the coming decade. But before getting into today's episode, we'd like to talk about IE subscription plans.

Interesting Engineering's exclusive membership allows you to access all content without ads. You will receive our premium newsletter, the Blueprint Weekly, special discounts from our IE Academy shop, and webinars. To discover more premium features, visit the link in the description, and then enjoy the advantages of IE Plus for $1 only a month for your first month. Now let's continue with today's episode. John, thanks for joining us. How are you today? Very good, thank you.

Excellent. And for our audience's benefit, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, please? Yeah, so I'm John Smee, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Qualcomm. Been there about 25 years, worked on 3G, 4G, 5G, and now leading the R&D teams as we're looking forward to designing 6G. Man and boy then. That's a long time. Okay then, can you explain what 6G is and how it will differ from 5G in terms of capabilities at user experience, please?

Yeah, it's always interesting when we look at the Gs. We like to say Qualcomm's in the G business. And typically, there's been a 10-year cadence between generations. If we look at kind of the 4G era in 2010 and 2020, the 5G era started around 2020, and we expect it's going to drive through the end of this decade. And that sets the stage for 6G being 2030 to 2040. And

And one of the things then is what allows these generations to have gains over the prior generation, benefits for the users, for the efficiency, is that a lot of technology is moving forward. It's not just the fact that wireless is getting better. We can do more megabits per second. It's the fact that computing is getting better. Cloud computing is obviously changing. Huge point of inflection right now with AI, generative AI, the evolution of how we connect

even the fact that everyone's now, you know, can take a Zoom or a Teams call from their phone or from their laptop or from Wi-Fi or from cellular. So there's an interesting change in consumer behavior

that comes about because these technologies take these bigger steps. And so that's the point that the generations represent the big step that's, generally speaking, what we call non-backwards compatible. That is, it's going to be capable of designing new basically integrated circuits on the base station side, on the device side, because you're taking that next step forward in a bigger way

And this builds on all of the evolution that occurs as we're moving through the 5G journey. Obviously, you know, new exciting devices coming out every year. Qualcomm, you know, leading a huge amount of connected compute devices, 5G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, UWB. So much of that tech is changing. And at the same point, the generations are when we take a step backwards and say, what are some of the bigger things we can align globally on?

and take that next step together based on all of that technology coming into what we call a new air interface. Okay. Well, building on that then, so what is the current state of 6G in that case? Is it going to be ready by 2030 or sooner?

Yeah. Generally speaking, the industry timeline is quite converged to be ready for 2030. And that's obviously the beginning of the 6G deployments. So what's interesting about the research part is it begins many, many years before the standardization. And then we're about to embark on the standardization. So within the 3GPP, that's the global standards body where cellular systems today are standardized.

We're already talking about what are interesting 6G use cases, what are some of those KPIs, those performance indicators? What do we want to make better in a concerted way? What is the focus of all of that engineering innovation?

What are we trying to solve? How are we putting the pieces together in a new framework? And at the same time, economics absolutely comes into it. So how can we be cost effective? How can we make sure that the upgrades for an infrastructure vendor, for an operator are very, very cost effective? Reusing whatever we can

and at the same time still bringing the benefits. So to your point on the 2030, yeah, we're in the stage now where we're discussing use cases. About 12 months from now, we're going to really begin in earnest with what we call the Release 20 study item around 6G. And there's going to be a workshop at the end of...

Basically around March 2025. And so there's a workshop where within the 3G community, all the companies globally are coming together to say, hey, let's put this stamp on it and let's then begin the study items. And then this works its way through 27, 28 into what we call the work item. And that's when literally the specification is written.

And the reason these specs are important, I give the example, it's the reason your phone works wherever you get off the plane, whatever base station you're talking to, because people are adhering to that global standard. And so the point of the interoperability between devices and networks, and as you hand off from one network provider to another one as you're driving through the countryside, that's all based on the power of the standard.

And so the point is the standard will be completing around, you know, 2028, 2029 timeframe. And we expect that to kind of formalize approximately, you know, halfway through 29. And that's what enables then the development of the tech to really make its way into those new devices around 2030.

So would we see an incremental increase from previous generations from memory? You go from 3 to 4, you get 3.5, and you might get 4.5. Would I expect to see a 5.5 in 2028, 2029, something like that? Yeah, it always comes down to there's kind of the marketing terminology. We're actually in what we call now 5G advanced. Some may term it 5.5G. At Qualcomm, we take the G trademark

transition seriously enough that we don't tend to ourselves use what I call non-integer generations because there's generally an assumption of you're actually always moving it forward. One way to think about it, between every generation, there's probably six or so releases of the standard. So 5G started with release 15 in the standard. And each of these releases takes about a year and a half to

two years or so, plus or minus. And so there's a release 15, 16, 17. That was the first half of 5G. And now releases 18, 19, 20 are the second half of 5G.

of 5G itself. And we're already within release 19 now, and 5G advanced is officially defined as releases 18 and beyond. And so in some sense, we are entering that second half of 5G from a technology standpoint, from a future device standpoint. So there is going to still be a lot of interesting 5G stuff making its way into the market in the next few years ahead of that 2030 timeline.

I see. Presumably you would expect to receive 6G in the cities, urban centers first before, because obviously you need to upgrade existing hardware, presumably. Yeah. And one of the interesting things is when we look at cellular, the fundamental value proposition of cellular is things like coverage.

You know, the fact that it works everywhere, the fact that it works, whether you're indoors, whether you're outdoors, the fact that it works, whether you're in your car, whether you're on a bicycle, whether you're sitting in the back of a taxi, whether you're, you know, sitting at a picnic table or at a coffee shop. And so part of that is then the incentive to really make sure we're fundamentally improving what it means for people to rely on cellular technology.

And one way to think about that technology and to your point on would it start in the urban centers or would start more in rural markets, it's about how people use the technology. And in some sense, what are the overall coverage and capacity capabilities of the current network? And if they're adding more spectrum or if they're using spectrum more efficiently, then that's translating into better user experiences. And I think

One way to think about it is you almost have to look at, if we look at say 2019 today, pre-COVID, pre that kind of change in where people were working and hybrid work. So you go all the way back to 2019 and you think, well, how was I using my device then? What was I doing? Even what applications were on my cell phone in 2019? And you think of today, what do you do on your device?

And all of a sudden you started like, wow, there's a lot of things I do differently in terms of whether people are watching streaming video, whether people are real-time uploading a video stream that they're filming, like a content creator. We look at then the notion of people are actually using a lot more capacity. They are actually doing a lot of stuff they wouldn't have done five years ago. And so the interesting part of these generations of technology is

You can kind of fixate on the data rate, you know, how many megabits or gigabits per second, but that's almost less meaningful than thinking, what are the applications you use within a given day where you're leveraging cellular? And that's something where the changes are more foundational because 5G brought so much capacity into what was then the LTE networks that, quite frankly, were running out of bandwidth.

And so it's something when we're looking to 6G, we're absolutely going to be adding capacity. We're also going to be making sure we improve existing bands. And at the same time, we're working globally to have new spectrum allocated to meet these future demands because we are seeing continued consumption increases on how people are using the wireless technology, either from the base station to the device or vice versa, from the device app to the base station.

And I would say an interesting way to look at that is to kind of think about what is the data being generated within the device? Because there can often be look at it. Well, I can do download streaming, right? I can watch a video and I can watch the video today. And maybe I have one or two screens. Maybe I have three or four speeds. Yeah. At some point you have a certain number of fixed screens that you could be watching, typically one per person. And at that point, hey, that saturates.

But what's not saturating is how people are starting to use the technology more and more. And then also how things like AI are changing all of a sudden. What does it mean for a device to not be connected?

So the value of a connected device. So at Qualcomm, we will talk about the edge of the network. And what we mean by the edge, that's where the smart school, the smart hospital, the factory, a setting where people are outdoors, a setting where people are indoors, whether it's work or whether it's a sports event, a stadium or shopping mall, or whether they're driving in their car.

and how they start using this technology all of a sudden is generating more traffic because that value is really being generated at the edge of the network. It's how we all interact with our various types of devices.

And so as the AI power of those devices is getting stronger and stronger every year, at Qualcomm, we have a huge amount of focus on generative AI on the device where we can actually implement quantized versions of these large language models with 7 billion parameters, an example, on the device. So all of a sudden, the device is much more intelligent and is still interacting with the network. The way that device is sharing its information

It's over 5G, it's over Wi-Fi, it's over Bluetooth, et cetera. So there's a lot of wireless connectivity that is getting challenged more because of the role of AI and the role of not just what's happening in the cloud, but what's happening at the edge, where the people are doing their jobs, engaging with their entertainment, engaging with their education, engaging in healthcare. So that's an interesting part that the sort of use cases that drive the traffic needs

of these new generations, they change on, sometimes they'll change slowly and then they'll change quickly. And so that's the interesting part of we're in this transformation because of AI. And as so many industries are starting to use AI,

it starts putting new future opportunities for the communications piece. And so I would argue that communications and computing are becoming more intertwined. They were generally viewed a little separately. You had your laptop, or you had your desktop, you had your laptop, you had your smartphone, and you did your compute stuff, and you maybe did some cloud computing. Oh, and then separately, yeah, you're connecting to the internet.

Well, now you can't really do computing unless you're connected. And then where you're doing your computing is changing. It's not just humans sitting at a desk, you know, engaging in a presentation or creating a document. It's the fact that that content generation and the value creation, if you will, those are really now untethered.

And so that's for us what represents kind of the exciting technology. As my team's designing 6G research, yeah, we're really engaging on where's augmented and virtual reality going? Where's connected automobiles going? How are factories being transformed? How is healthcare being transformed? Whether it's the evolution of smart wearables, whether it's different ways of monitoring patients from telehealth perspective.

All of that actually has a repercussion to the communication system we're designing. So it's kind of a complicated answer to a question of how people are using the generations

and what sort of pieces come into it. Yeah, I think one bottleneck that comes to mind, say you want to use as much really fancy stuff for AI on your computer, but you're in a rural setting and the infrastructure is just not up to scratch to handle 6G. How can that be overcome so that

especially with more remote working or business, e-commerce, whatever, people having more business online. Perhaps they don't want to be in the cities. They want to benefit from 6G, but the infrastructure in their local village, they just can't handle it. Is there a way around that? Well, I would say there's two parts to that answer. And one is that

The 6G itself will indeed have significant capacity and coverage gains, even for rural areas. That will actually be a big focus where it's not just about urban. It's really about, if we look at things like connected agriculture or transforming the value of that connectivity, obviously, IoT has been a word that's had many different meetings over the past couple of decades. But right now, there really is this recognition that

Things that are connected can be more intelligent. And once they're connected, where computing happens to your point, yeah, it's not always happening in the cloud. You want an instantaneous, fast decision. There's a notion of inference, that is how you make the decision. And then there's training. So you could train in the cloud.

But in many instances, you're going to be able to actually implement the AI on the device. And so that's something where you're running the models, if you will, the large language models, you're running that actually on the device at the endpoint, whether it's the sensor, whether it's the smartphone, the XR glasses, the smartwatch. And so that's the interesting part that

There's been a lot of focus on AI in the cloud, but as AI moves into the device, then all of a sudden, absolutely, you're able to do more stuff autonomously right at the device. And at the same time, we are improving the communications capabilities of those devices, recognizing that whether it's the radio frequency integrated circuits, the baseband integrated circuits, how we use spectrum and how we achieve coverage

It's really interesting to think of the, this, the many, many intelligent ways that multiple antennas, as an example, where you're combining signals, you're able to steer the energy to, you know, the intended device. And at the same time, the base station is able to pull together the information from a device that's far away. So the coverage of these cellular systems is getting a lot better because of sophisticated processing techniques. And so that's the other interesting thing is that AI itself is,

is also actually improving the cellular system. So we have AI on the device to improve the wireless capabilities in addition to the applications. And we have AI in the network improving how things are scheduled, improving the orchestration of the system, improving what we call the quality of service so that you're getting that information at the right latency, at the right data rate, with the right payloads and situations. So there's a lot of

interesting intersection between AI and 5G today and AI with 6G tomorrow because it's a tool, it's an application, it's a technology, it's a use case, and it becomes pervasive.

And so once that computing part becomes pervasive, then the pervasive communications becomes much more important. Okay. Would something like Starlink help with this? Obviously, you've got to physically, if you're out in the rural areas, either you've got to build the cell towers or upgrade them or lay better cables. If you just stick it on satellites, I mean, you've got to upgrade the satellites, I suppose, presumably at some point in the future. But I guess that'll be a way around this.

Well, satellites are actually, it's a great question because the intersection of satellite and cellular is getting stronger and stronger. So even within 5G itself, there's something called non-terrestrial networking, NTN. It's kind of a funny acronym. And so NTN was part of the Release 17 specification that completed a few years ago. So even my R&D team has implemented Release 17 compliant NTN device modification so that it can communicate

you know, over what would be a satellite link. And so the role of then coverage and the global coverage afforded by a satellite constellation of LEOs, like low-Earth orbit satellites,

That is actually, you know, today it can compliment wireless in certain scenarios. And that's what you're seeing. If you're seeing a lot more recognition that, yeah, people do want to fall back, whether it's an emergency calling the kind of, hey, someone got lost hiking and they're out of cellular coverage, they're deep, deep, deep away from any sort of infrastructure. It would be awesome if they had a satellite modem functionality in that device. And so those are some of the things that are happening now. And at

And at the same time, we're actually designing even as part of 6G that integration of terrestrial and non-terrestrial networking so that it's a smoother thing. And then also so that there's more economies of scale. You wouldn't expect every single operator to launch their own satellite constellation.

So the reality of the global situation for satellites and the spectrum aspects, those all become really, really important because that's what defines the economic viability of operating a constellation and operating the system. And so what's interesting now is a recognition of

That, hey, it would be great in addition to connecting to what we call those VSAT, those like fixed, you know, larger satellite, we used to call them satellite dishes right back in the day on your home. Maybe that was for watching television. Well, now there's a notion, hey, I'm going to have a more compact one that's more sophisticated and I could be using that for, you know, basically accessing the internet. And then we start saying, hey, what are some techniques to bring that all the way into the phone?

And so it's in a device that's in the palm of your hands, very sophisticated, caddated antenna circuitry. You know, what are we also doing with different frequency bands to make that feasible? And so the point is that we've designed 5G, which is this very, very capable, what we would call the waveform as in what's being transmitted over the air.

hey, there's nothing stopping you from putting that over a satellite, but we have to account for the fact that those low Earth orbit satellites, those LEOs, are actually circulating the globe at a very high velocity. So we're undoing some of the phase shifts of basically what we call the Doppler compensation. So there's a lot of interesting technology stuff to say,

let's make that satellite link to the phone be robust and have that performance level. So for Qualcomm, this is a very exciting area. And you may know that even deep in our history, we had the GlobalStar satellite system where we were one of the key designers of that whole thing. So we have a lot of satellite know-how and a lot of interesting system trade-offs come in. And that's why it's been kind of exciting as part of 5G, 6G. There's so much saying, hey, let's really make sure we're

We're having those critical conversations about satellite, about drones, about different types of what we call high altitude platforms. Because we're also seeing, that's a great also use case that, you know, things that are like drones that are, and you start talking into, you know, what's 100 meters off the ground, what's 300 meters off the ground versus, you know, where a satellite is, a GEO or a LEO.

And so all of a sudden you're realizing, hey, there's actually this space, air, ground, integrated network aspect where, and you would say, hey, is that a user terminal flying around in the air? Or is it a base station flying around in the air, right? You could take a different perspective to what it is, right? And so the point is there are scenarios where you have a, you know, like a satellite system would be wearing, it's like the base stations in the sky, right?

Well, there's also the example of a drone where the drone is like the user is in the sky and it's being communicated to with a ground network that has slightly different antenna pointing to address, you know, drones that are flying around.

And then you start saying, well, those drones then could also maybe serve some additional users because they're up there and they have a wide field of view. So from a technology standpoint, at Qualcomm, we have a lot of interesting research and development across all of these different scenarios to make sure we're kind of bringing the value across many of these different use cases. So it's definitely a great question because it does touch on a lot of different

parts that it's not a pure cellular answer. It's really more about how the technology ecosystem, the use cases, the capabilities are evolving globally. Interesting. So in the future, we could have, well, not blimps, but large balloon carrying antennae, basically, I guess, for one of the better... You could. Historically, and even in the relatively short history a few years ago, it's turned out to be, you know, less...

economically robust and saying, hey, let's just make sure we have a really sophisticated base station. Because the point is the base stations now are connected by fiber. And so that is incredibly robust, which is where if you look at a lot of global operators, they might be cellular operators, they're absolutely investing in their fiber footprint. And so I think that's an important part that

there is a real value to a robust terrestrial as in ground-based network. And so we do see a lot of, that's one of the interesting things that cellular technology is kind of now recognized to be part, like a significant part of the communications grid, right? The backbone of society. So the role of the wireless part and the wired part from a, you know, nation's, you know, basically,

connectivity footprint and backbone, they're kind of viewed as really being symbiotic. And so I think that's where saying, hey, we got to put everything up in the sky is also, it's great when you're, there's certain scenarios like you're over the ocean, it's the only option you have, or you're incredibly far away from civilization, then it's a great option.

The reality is that the terrestrial networks are also, they have more technologies that enable them to go farther. They lay fiber over huge distances, and then all of a sudden, you're bringing connectivity much deeper than you were a decade ago.

Yeah, with modern economies going more online, being more digital, I guess from a strategic point of view, a national security point of view, having it on the ground, terrestrials safer, in very commas, than things in the air or even satellites which could be destroyed, intercepted.

And then you, yeah, locations are down, right? Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Um, you mentioned agriculture and some other industries, um, but, uh, what other industries could benefit from 6g technology and how.

Yeah, I think one of the interesting ones, like you can look at augmented virtual reality as like people would say, hey, that was the, you know, the key example because it aligns from a, it's kind of ramping already as we speak, right? There's a lot of new types of devices coming. You might've seen those, you know, Ray-Ban glasses that could communicate and all of a sudden this notion of having a,

you know, that the speakers be built into the sides of the glasses, the frame versus like specifically in your ear. They're actually, you know, basically that different type of speaker technology where from a vibration standpoint. So there's a lot of interesting stuff where AR VR is a really interesting use case because it's evolution and expansion, you know, dovetails really well with the communication alignment of what's going on in 5G advanced into 6G.

But I would say what's also really interesting is you kind of take a step back and you start looking at connected healthcare, where that's a good example where it's not so much that, oh my gosh, I can't talk to my doctor on a video call on 5G, let alone 4G. It's really the fact that that 5G and into 6G, that world in 2030 is going to be so much more immersive in terms of how you interact with

in the field of medicine. So what is the information that a nurse or a physician's assistant or a doctor has when they're engaging with the physical patient in front of them? What's the information that the patient and the doctor or the medical provider has when the person's returned home? What's the sort of information in terms of real-time data from sensors?

And how does that benefit from the broader information that's in the cloud? So you can look at information in terms of its instantaneousness. Like, is it immediate? Like, it took your blood pressure right now? Like, every time you go to the doctor's office, they still take your blood pressure as you sit down? Because that's like a real-time reading. So regardless of anything that's going on, this data point correlates with some things, and they kind of want to know that number.

And so there's a lot of other numbers that will be beneficial to know right away, just in terms of a quick view of a patient's health. And then you have the fact of your particular history. They can have your long-term history, your family history, and then there's your intermediate histories in like, hey, what's been going on the last six months or so? How is that situation healing? What's the particular health concern you have at this moment?

And then you have the huge amount of medical history and why doctors still have to go to school for a long time. There's a lot of stuff to learn. And so what I think is interesting is that communications evolution from 4G to 5G, 5G to 6G, from 2010 to 2020, 2020 to 2030. And then you take an example like healthcare and you think of the information flow and what's actually going to improve an outcome for you

This is much more meaningful than did I get like X megabits per second or twice as much megabits per second. I think the point of that value being about the connectivity combined with the information, that's the kind of journey that many different industries are on. So that 6G continuum where we move into

world of 2030 applications, a world of 20, like what is the industries look like? So many industries today are being transformed by AI. And so all of a sudden, workflows are changing, things are being digitized, workers are getting made more productive, right? So that's one of the other interesting things is going back to that AR VR.

You could view it concretely of, hey, what is the AR, VR, you know, chipset sales for a company like Qualcomm? Or what are the AR, VR applications? Or what are the AR, VR use cases?

The reality is you can look at that in a broader context of, well, how is a factory worker going to be using augmented virtual reality? How is a medical person going to be using AR, VR? When are students going to just be wearing smart glasses that is providing contextually relevant additional information beyond what the teacher is saying? And when is the teacher going to be taking their classroom through a digital twin of some learning example?

where all of a sudden that merging of what we call the physical, digital, and virtual worlds, that's going to be much more significant in the 2030 timeframe than it is today. So those are examples where that 6G connectivity, the fact that we're improving coverage, improving capacity, improving latency, improving the overall user experience,

And the fact that so many different types of devices are being connected, you know, that's something where I view it as transforming a variety of these industries. You can look at it bottoms up and you can look at it tops down. And so that's where the bottoms up part is that each of those industries are, they're trying to solve real problems. If I'm a factory owner, I'm trying to compete with my competitors who may or may not be in my own country. They may have different pricing competition. And so all of a sudden for me as an enterprise,

How I use technology, there's an absolute component to where can I raise the sophistication and capabilities of what I'm doing. And there's a relative component of investment and return and risk and reward. And so that 6G opportunity transforms these industries dramatically.

along with other interrelated technology like AI and cloud and the types of connected IoT devices, the way humans are going to be doing their computing in 2030. And so for me, it's something where I look at the healthcare side and I look at the enterprise side, the so-called office worker of the future, or you look at the medical practitioner of the future, or you look at the educator of the future, and we talk of agriculture in the future. You

What's that information that's enabling the farmer to be more efficient with crop yields, more efficient with what are they planting? How are they watering it? Are they wasting water? How are they handling that entire value chain? Anyway, so that's where, from my standpoint,

It represents a lot of different things coming together within kind of this top-down framework of, hey, every 10 years, as an industry globally, we get to design a much more capable product

um, system that leverages the past assets that brings in new capabilities that we couldn't evolve to. So it's always a mixture of evolution plus revolution, a mixture of reuse with, you know, new designs. And so you're bringing that, that those things together and obviously it gets mapped across the economic realities of, of who's deploying, who's paying, what is the economics, um, enabling this broader part. And I think to your point as well on the

The globally, yeah, countries care about this. They care about how connected their society is because the same way they care about what's the health of their society, what's the, you know, the educational capabilities of their society, what is affecting their GDP opportunities to grow that.

How is that country competing with other countries? How are some things that are more absolute where, hey, if we all do this better, we can actually improve the energy efficiency of the overall networks in every country. And that benefits everybody from an energy consumption standpoint. So there's a lot of things where there's the local micro competition of enthusiastic new business opportunities.

And then there's the reality that as you aggregate and take those steps away, that you realize, oh, there's multiple operators in every country and multiple countries are all looking at things in an interrelated, connected world. We could also produce new industries, I guess, as well. I don't know, say with gaming, you could have fully immersive gaming or it could completely change cinema. I don't know, tourism. Absolutely.

And that's what the point of content creation and sharing, right? I think one of the other trends that is a macro trend is what we call the long tail of content, right? Back to the day where there was only three TV stations and that all the shows you wanted to watch, or at least were aware of. So that was your only choice. So it was a self-fulfilling, I'm going to watch one of these three networks.

versus now individual people can become creators and they're going to find an audience and that audience is going to be curated and people are going to change based on what other people like watching. And then all of a sudden, the creation of content

and their remuneration, to your point on the economics of, for example, being a video streamer, creating content in a way that's relevant to your audience. Like, hey, I'm going to create this travel blog. I don't know the last time you went on a vacation, but almost surely you were doing a little bit of video watching. Oh my God, we should go to this site and here's this interesting video and they're describing this historical thing. And at the same time, they're saying, and this is the perfect coffee shop to stop in after you've seen that ancient castle.

So all of that stuff involves that kind of content creation, content communication. And all of a sudden, the quality of the camera in your smartphone today is incredible, which is enabling that. You don't have to bring a video crew with you to sit down in a coffee shop and talk about the ambiance and situation. And so you take that to the next step forward.

We have large language models today. There's large video models. There's large, you know, basically you go from text and you start getting into, you know, like basic images that are still. And obviously a series of moving, of still images is a moving image. And then all of a sudden you start realizing there can be a much more sophisticated way

a digital twin of something where putting on that AR VR headset, you immerse yourself into that environment.

And then all of a sudden, um, that kind of, I see what you see. I have smart glasses on, they have cameras, they have microphones. I'm interacting in my physical environment. I can share that with my friend, with my father, maybe who can no longer travel and he can see, Hey, you know, dad, take a look at this. And all of a sudden he's also, you know, puts on his goggles and he's immersed in the same view.

So there's a lot of examples like that that make me really optimistic about that intersection of where is 6G going? Where are the use cases coming? I think the way society connects, the way we look at augmenting human productivity, augmenting human experiences, basically a more intuitive way that that technology and those human computer interfaces change.

So we kind of got used to our keyboards and our mouses, and that is absolutely on a very fast journey of changing. And so going back to that, how do people use tech when they're at work today? Even what is the definition of their work productivity, the stuff they do approximately eight hours a day? That's actually changing really quickly. And so the communications and computing and on-device AI and generative AI

I think all of that stuff happening right now, that's why it's kind of so exciting that our 6G team is really immersed in a lot of these different

technologies and use case explorations, because we're trying to drive it into this broader opportunity across many different use cases. And reality is we don't really know what's that one perfect use case. It's really more about let's make sure we're making the most fundamental, robust improvements in the core technology so that it's ready come the future time periods.

Yeah, it got me really excited. So bring on 2030. Something that might hamper its development is obviously government regulations and whatnot. So what challenges do you foresee with 6G?

One of the interesting things is we've seen a very strong, even as there's always a lot of discussion of trade wars and geopolitical conflict, we've seen a huge amount of recognition across every country that this is something when we're stronger together. So having that unified global standard is more efficient. It doesn't hold back any particular country. It creates an equal playing field of opportunity.

And so that's a great example where we have seen actually a very strong continued, um,

interest in that single global 5G, 6G standard. And that's a really important one because that's where to the point on where nations are cooperating, where companies are cooperating, where industries, they're even competing. Obviously there's car companies in every country, but at the same time, the automotive industry say, hey, we can actually bring cellular into vehicles, right? Which is why almost any vehicle you buy today is going to have that cellular connectivity. Right.

And so how is that digital transformation of that connected experience changing? Well, that's something where you want to have that happen on a global scale. And that standard brings that together. So in my view, the kind of opportunities and risks, we are seeing a recognition of the value in that global system, right? Where Qualcomm's obviously been an innovator in the generations for many, many years now, for decades, right?

And it's something that's really important because then from a horizontal standpoint, we're able to bring that innovation to a larger number of industries and applications and use cases without there being fragmentation and what we call NRE where everyone's fighting with each other. So it's a great example where there's a huge amount of opportunity for differentiation and product competition and service competition, but at the same time, the global standard itself

is that level playing field. And so that's something where, whether it's Europe, Asia, India, Japan, China, Korea, what have you, United States, South America, all of that kind of coming together to use that single global standard is a great example of international cooperation and recognition. And so in my view, one of the interesting parts of those generations is that on that 10-year cadence,

Everyone's kind of thinking long-term together. And I think that's that part where what makes the generations different is the accumulation of little things into big things combined with, you know, separate new revolutionary technologies that were impossible in the future that are now possible. So you're bringing that accumulation together in a concerted way to kind of meet those future needs. And that's where we really leverage that international cooperation.

Okay, fair enough. In your view, what steps are being taken to ensure 6G networks are energy efficient and sustainable? Yeah, energy efficiency is actually a great question because it's a big focus of when we look at the operational economics of operating a network. You can look at, you know, you got to get the spectrum. And in some countries that's free, in other countries there's an auction, it's a competitive auction, a complicated bidding process.

Obviously, people are then operating these networks. They have employees who are basically managing the deployment of the infrastructure, the maintenance of the infrastructure, the hardware software upgrades, all of that stuff. But the other point is that the energy consumption is also really important. So just as you would have seen a lot of points around what's the AI compute efficiency, what are the power needs of artificial intelligence?

Well, at Qualcomm, we're driving a lot of interesting techniques into, hey, let's make sure that base station device is as efficient as possible in terms of

You can think of how many megabits per second or the transfer of information in a volumetric way. So in a given period of time over a given 3D amount of space or two-dimensional like a city, how many bits were transmitted from the network to devices and vice versa? And as a function of time, how many kilowatt hours, that is how much energy was expended. So we call that energy per bit.

And even it goes very, very deep all the way down to the math of EB over N naught. So if you talk to any communications engineer and they mentioned information theory or communication theory, that term is incredibly important, energy per bit. So that's something that the industry has been improving over time. But there's a real focus now on saying, hey, how can we actually look more specifically at

the energy consumption of these transmissions. And so there's a lot of power savings techniques that are built into the device. You might not know how often the device is shutting down little pieces of the circuitry, what we call sleep modes, and there's deep sleep, there's light sleep, there's deep light sleep. It's a huge amount of sophistication to make sure the device is waking up, listening, transmitting, going to sleep, and all those things. At the same time, the network is also becoming more responsive.

So how much energy is being consumed at 2 a.m. versus at 5 p.m. in the rush hour traffic? And so there's a lot of examples where what we've been bringing into the standards is improved techniques around that approach.

basically interaction between the network and the device, how often can certain things be avoided? How often can we synchronize timing so it's more targeted so that things are happening at just the right time so the network's more responsive? It's not just broadcasting stuff all the time in case anyone happens to drive by. It still has to do a little bit of that so that if you randomly turn on your phone at 2 in the morning, it's not like, oh, the base station's sleeping. I guess I'll wait till 6 a.m. No, you're going to get a signal.

but it is done much more efficiently and is done across all the different bands and bandwidths so that it's more optimized. So the short point is that AI and that kind of sophistication of the network is making it more responsive. And that's what enables it to kind of, you know, consume a lot less power when it doesn't need to. And when it is communicating power for that specific communication needs, that's what we term the spectral efficiency, the bits per second per hertz.

We're actually making that better with new modulation, the coding, the waveform design, the peak to average ratio of the power amplifiers, et cetera. So it kind of combines a series of what we call link techniques and network techniques where you have to view the broader system

It's not just the fact that you only have to charge your phone once a day and is doing huge amounts of stuff, like basically crazy amounts of stuff. If you think about 10 years ago or 20 years ago, what you did on your same phone that you still had to charge once a day. And you didn't have this awesome screen with amazing graphics and the CPU and a GPU and an MPU and neural processor all within the phone, all the multimedia processing, all the cameras, very impressive audio.

and I still charging it once a day, that's incredibly impressive. And at the same time, yeah, what are some of the techniques we can do on the network side? Yeah. Presumably AI would also help improve it, kind of improve each other when they cross-pollinate.

Exactly. And one way to think about it is that historically, communication systems were very statistical. That is, you design for some distribution, some average, some worst case, the fifth percentile of this, the 95th percentile of that, the average or median user experience, where now the point is the system can become more predictive.

It understands the applications you're using. It could even understand your drive route. It can be able to, you know, predict things better. So as you move from a statistical, hey, let's just design for the general worst case and we over-provision on average just in case so that we're designing for the busy hour as it were.

No, now the system's actually much more responsive and it's more predictive and more adaptive. So we can actually adapt to, oh my gosh, the Super Bowl is happening. There's all these people who are in the stadium right now. So what can we do to really steer capacity in that direction at that point in time? And how does that evolve? So it is interesting where one of that kind of journeys as we're kind of designing into 6G is the fact that the system, I mentioned the word digital twin earlier, is

the system becomes more responsive,

And it basically becomes hyper-localized. So it's doing just the right thing at the right time. Your phone has machine learning built into it. The algorithms that are happening on the phone, the algorithms that are happening on the base station are intertwined so they can efficiently share that workload. So it's a really rich area of R&D. And I have a specific team working on just that intersection as they're saying, hey, how can they design what I call an artificially intelligent interface

air interface. So we're bringing AI into the network, into the device, and even into the standard itself. So that communications protocol between the device and the network has AI built into it. Okay. So with networks becoming smarter and more connected, then how will 6G address things like cybersecurity and data privacy?

Yeah. So that always is an incredibly important topic. And so what's interesting on the security part, it's about basically there's an implementation aspect. There's the fact that your device itself needs to be secure. The network needs to be secure. And so there's also the fact of how do we use encryption? How do we design the end-to-end systems? And so recognizing that the surface area of cellular, the number and types of the

connected devices is only getting larger. That's why there's always been a focus. There's a specific study group and sorry, a specific working group within 3GP called SA3, where they actually focus on that security piece. And so a lot of the industry experts come together and say, hey, let's make sure that that error interface is as secure as possible. Let's make sure that what's happening at the core network side, when you first power on your phone, let's make sure that the system

is precluding what we call these kind of man-in-the-middle attacks or spoofing, where there's a fake base station that your phone connects to. So there's the software implementation side to make sure the algorithms are good. And then there's the fact that we can actually embed basically security and root of trust right into the silicon. And it even gets into supply chain

visibility that we know particular for our integrated circuit business, where those chips were fabricated. We understand that supply chain part. We understand that secure root of trust all the way into the transistors within the chip, let alone the algorithms that are operating at the network. And so that's one of the parts where as we moved away from, hey, cell phones were just for making voice calls back in the day.

to the fact that no, this is really a connected backbone of society. Industries are relying on this. A lot of systems even think of connected vehicles and the value that they're placing on that cellular link. So there's a lot of focus on that reliability and as you say as well, that security piece.

It sounds like blockchain will become important then, or more important moving forward. Well, blockchain is always interesting as a distributed ledger technology. And I'm glad you said blockchain and not Bitcoin. So we're not talking on the value of these different currencies as opposed to the fact that it was also a technology. And what's interesting about it is,

And this kind of gets into these kind of intellectual constructs of distributed versus centralized. And so just like you could say it's a distributed currency versus a centralized bank. The same thing is true in technology that when is an algorithm centralized? So it's not like there's one all-knowing scheduler that knows every single connectivity across the whole country and it's deciding every little thing. No, we actually build robustness

into the communications protocol by enabling autonomous behavior from a device, right? So the device, yeah, you turn on your device whenever you want and what's the algorithms running within that phone? How are the algorithms running within the base station? And so we often talk about this distributed intelligence where you, just from a scaling standpoint, you don't want to have it all centralized because that creates a bottleneck.

And also to your point on the robustness of distributed algorithms. So a distributed algorithm whose performance is close to the centralized performance is very compelling. And you might have heard...

If you look also at machine learning and this notion of federated learning, and if I learn a little bit and you learn a little bit, then together we learn more, right? And then a third person comes in and all of a sudden we know a lot. So that exchanging of information that's relevant to the different parties who are gathering that information, that's a good way to make the system more robust, more secure. And it kind of goes back into...

the algorithm design itself, when is it distributed, when is it centralized, when is there cooperation between units, how are things shared and kind of leveraged across each other? Okay, well, it feeds in nicely to Monard's question. And so what's your vision of the world with 6G in place? How do you think it will shape the evolution of global communication and innovation over the next decade?

Yeah, when I look at that next decade, that 2030 to 2040, it's really important to take that broader timeline of how people are going to be using technology and how are they going to be doing computing and communications and improving their daily lives. And so it's an interesting part. My vision for how we're driving our 6G research is to make sure we're attacking the right problems

where we're getting that performance improvement. We know what we can make better. Well, let's push that as hard as possible. So it's not about perfectly predicting the unique scenario. It's about making sure that global 6G system and the innovations that go into it are as profound and fundamental as possible so that we're designing for that unknown future

And at the same time, building in that flexibility that it can adapt to these different scenarios based on how these, you know, whether it's a smart school, a smart factory, a smart hospital, all of those different things are going to use the technology differently.

From my standpoint, that international cooperation, we do a lot of collaboration with academics globally. It's a great example where you're bringing together super long-term topics with short-term realities with, hey, what sort of integrated circuit can I build? What sort of process technology am I going to use from a fab standpoint to make that 2030 product?

but I'm bringing together mathematical constructs that have been getting researched for many, many years. In my view, that 6G vision is really about bringing together evolution and revolution, long-term academic research with short-term business realities and making sure, hey, how are we making something that's going to be as relevant as possible for many of these markets?

and kind of getting that information that's uniquely relevant to, hey, this is going to be really important for this portion of the opportunity, but how do I make sure that I can map that to others as well to get that reuse? So I'm very optimistic on the kind of global 6G system coming together. And right now there's all that discussion between companies, between industries, between governments saying, hey, this is our goals for that connected future.

Can I improve my GDP? Can I improve the health care of my citizens? Can I improve that overall communications backbone? And so for me, it's really that continuum of evolution, recognizing there's a unique opportunity that's coming as part of this generational change. Let's bring a lot of this technology forward into that framework. Excellent.

That's the end of my questions. Is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't discussed regarding 6G you can think of? It's really been my pleasure to chat with you and it's been a really enjoyable conversation for me. Yeah, you've got me pumped, man. Before we go, is there any social media or websites or something you'd like to share with our audience?

Yeah, we can. We can basically if we look at the Qualcomm.com, there's a lot of interesting, you know, research parts that's specific to how we're designing our 6G vision, some of the blogs that we call the 6G foundry, where we're putting together and kind of have been sharing our kind of most provocative concepts in one spot. So yeah.

basically our kind of research website and we have a lot of stuff that becomes public every year as part of these international demonstrations where that also helps put a physical specificity to it. So there's a technology demonstration part

early vision for how we see it coming together, not just in paper and PowerPoint, but actually physical prototypes and demonstrations. And so that's something we showcase every year in Barcelona at MWC. And at the same time, we actually have it all visible at Qualcomm.com. So very exciting to share that with the audience. Fantastic. Well, in that case, thank you for your time, John. That was genuinely very interesting.

Thanks very much. And that concludes this episode of Lexicon. Thank you all for tuning in and being our guest today. Follow our social media channels for the latest science and technology news. Also, don't forget to explore our IE Plus subscription plans. Goodbye for now.