The advent of 5G has brought a wave of innovation like we have never seen before. It is evident throughout the carriers building and investing in communications infrastructure, the device OEMs creating devices that can harness the power of this new bandwidth and low latency capabilities, and the semiconductor industry pushing the boundaries of individual components and solutions that play a critical role in making 5G a living, breathing reality. However, to unlock the full potential of 5G and accelerate the pace of innovations from apps to solutions to infrastructure, tight collaboration across the intelligent edge, cloud, device manufacturers, and carrier ecosystems is imperative.
5G is blazing the trail for more connectivity by delivering a fast, high-capacity connection. However, 5G is much more than just speed — it also allows for ultra-low latency which means the network enables faster response times. This can help your car become more autonomous or in the virtual world blend with reality. 5G also promises massive machine-to-machine communications which for areas such as IoT, will unlock the 5G advantage and contribute towards the growth of connected devices.
Consumers will reap the biggest benefits from the rich insight-driven experiences made possible by 5G. With AI, we can derive insights from data to make our world more predictive, optimized, and efficient — in many areas including healthcare, automotive and smart cities.
Through the possibilities of 5G and the power of AI, contextual awareness will be brought to life. With a myriad of smart devices connected to a 5G network, data is constantly being created, collected and analyzed, and the output is a tangible response that anticipates and provides customized responses.
Imagine, for example, a morning commute where your alarm goes off and your coffee machine knows exactly how long you take to get out of bed to make a cup of coffee right when you get into the kitchen. From there, your phone tells you when it’s time to leave for work based off your calendar for the day and informs your car to power on, pull up to your driveway, and safely drive you to the office with the most efficient route by communicating with other cars, city cameras, and traffic lights. While in the car, your watch monitors your emotions and mood and plays music custom tailored for you until you arrive. This is just a glimpse of what your daily reality could be with 5G impacting your every move, and every moment of your life with personalized experiences powered by data-driven insights.
As 5G and AI converge at the intelligent edge, innovation around storing, transferring, and processing of data continues at pace. To harness the benefits of 5G and AI, we need to continue accelerating innovation, thinking big and using data for good.
One area where we will see 5G enhance our everyday lives is smart cities. 5G’s capabilities through enhanced bandwidth, low latency and massive machine to machine communications will lay the foundation to improve city infrastructure, transportation, energy-efficient and sustainable living, and social and sharing economy interactions in ways we can’t even begin to imagine. Cities will be able to optimize power usage by investing in smart sensors and smart grids to track power demands and optimize power usage at specific locations to relieve stresses on the power grid at points where blackouts are more likely.
Traffic management and efficiency is another important component of a smart city. AI-enabled traffic management can combine smart sensors on pavements and city cameras with AI to send you real-time alerts and offer alternative routes. 5G will enable the sharing and transmission of massive amounts of data for intelligent vehicle sensors such as 4D radar and CV-2X which better equip your car to see and communicate with other cars and infrastructure and travel safely.
This is just one example of how 5G-transmitted data will be applied to enrich and personalize experiences – we’ll also see powerful innovations across healthcare, shopping, nutrition, fitness and more. And the heart of all these innovations is memory and storage. Data is the untapped resource that will fuel these data-intensive innovations and experiences, and semiconductor innovation will be critical to unlocking this potential.
Innovations rising from the availability of 5G will demand underlying infrastructure across devices and from edge to cloud, meaning that infrastructure must be re-architected from the ground up to optimize for data centricity. This requires memory and storage solutions — and semiconductor innovation — across this continuum from edge to cloud.
As the semiconductor industry embraces the demand born from 5G and the new data economy, DRAM and NAND are experiencing rapid growth. Customers are demanding platforms with larger footprints of more advanced memory and storage technology.
For memory and storage specifically, the projection of the amount of data capacity shipped is 3X growth in flash and 2X growth of DRAM from 2021 to 2025, according to Gartner (“Semiconductor Forecast Database, Worldwide, 3Q21 Update”, Ben Lee, Nolan Reilly, et.al) We see this explosive growth continuing as 5G and other data-rich innovations increasingly require high-performance compute foundation of memory and storage to power the next wave of experiences. 5G will ultimately drive demand in many sectors and affect every segment of the semiconductor industry.
DRAM optimized for specific applications will power the growing 5G needs of today and the future – that includes DDR for traditional compute applications, LPDDR for battery-powered devices, and GDDR for ultra-bandwidth solutions for high-performance gaming and AI. CXL, a new industry standard interconnect, along with embedded storage utilizing eMMC and UFS interfaces, will also support those needs.
In order to fully realize 5G’s potential, the cloud, edge and device ecosystems must also collectively push the envelope of what’s possible. This requires a new, holistic approach to the design of end user experiences and applications. Starting with hardware architecture (processing, memory, storage, sensors, display), software must be tightly coupled, and semiconductor suppliers must collaborate with each other as well as the rest of the ecosystem (cloud service providers, OEMs, OSVs, CSVs, carriers and app developers) to create a seamless environment where 5G devices can thrive, applications developed, services deployed and data can be used in ways that we haven’t yet imagined.
With close collaboration, focus and tenacity, we can accelerate innovations across all facets of the semiconductor industry to truly push the boundaries of what is possible from the convergence of 5G, AI and edge computing. Imagine what the next killer app could be or think bigger and imagine how data and AI can be used to solve the world’s greatest challenges.
The opportunities are boundless and lie in the data — now let's go uncover them.
Raj Talluri is senior vice president and general manager of Micron’s Mobile Business Unit.